Student's Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, Vol. 4: 1945 to 1970

STUDENT’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS Volume IV: 1945 to 1970

STUDENT’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS Volume IV: 1945 to 1970

BLAKE HOBBY PATRICIA M. GANTT, GENER AL EDITOR

Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, 1945 to 1970 Copyright © 2010 by Blake Hobby All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Student’s encyclopedia of great American writers / Patricia Gantt, general editor. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: [1] Beginnings to 1830 / Andrea Tinnemeyer — [2] 1830 to 1900 / Paul Crumbley — [3] 1900 to 1945 / Robert C. Evans — [4] 1945 to 1970 / Blake Hobby — [5] 1970 to the present / Patricia Gantt. ISBN 978-0-8160-6087-0 (hardcover: acid-free paper) ISBN 978-1-4381-3125-2 (e-book) 1. Authors, American—Biography—Encyclopedias, Juvenile. 2. American literature—Encyclopedias, Juvenile. I. Tinnemeyer, Andrea. II. Gantt, Patricia M., 1943– PS129.S83 2009 810.9’0003—dc22 [B] 2009030783 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design by Annie O’Donnell Composition by Mary Susan Ryan-Flynn Cover printed by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Book printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Mich. Date printed: June 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents List of Writers and Works Included Series Preface Volume Introduction Edward Albee James Baldwin Saul Bellow Elizabeth Bishop Ray Bradbury Gwendolyn Brooks Truman Capote John Cheever Ralph Ellison Lawrence Ferlinghetti Allen Ginsberg Alex Haley Lorraine Hansberry Robert Hayden Joseph Heller Shirley Jackson Randall Jarrell Jack Kerouac Ken Kesey Martin Luther King, Jr. John Knowles Harper Lee Denise Levertov Robert Lowell Bernard Malamud

vi xi xii 1 13 33 46 63 76 90 96 107 121 131 145 151 163 178 191 196 206 218 227 243 252 261 279 296

Malcolm X

310

Paule Marshall

322

Arthur Miller

336

N. Scott Momaday

352

Flannery O’Connor

366

Sylvia Plath

383

Chaim Potok

402

Ayn Rand

412

Theodore Roethke

425

Philip Roth

438

J. D. Salinger

451

Anne Sexton

466

May Swenson

479

John Updike

491

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

504

Robert Penn Warren

521

Eudora Welty

535

Richard Wilbur

548

Tennessee Williams

559

Appendix I: Alphabetical List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

576

Appendix II: Chronological List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, by Birth Date 579

List of Writers and Works Included Edward Albee

“The Moose” (1972)

1

“One Art” (1976)

The Zoo Story (1959) The Sandbox (1960) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962)

James Baldwin

“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (1948)

13

Ray Bradbury

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) Notes of a Native Son (1955) Giovanni’s Room (1956) “Sonny’s Blues” (1957) The Fire Next Time (1963) Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) “The Rockpile” (in Going to Meet the Man, 1965)

63

The Martian Chronicles (1950) “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Dandelion Wine (1957)

Gwendolyn Brooks

76

“kitchenette building” (1945) “the mother” (1945)

Saul Bellow

“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” (1960)

33

“Looking for Mr. Green” (1951) The Adventures of Augie March (1954) Seize the Day (1956) Herzog (1964) Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

Elizabeth Bishop

“The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” (1960) “We Real Cool” (1960) “Riot” (1969)

46

Truman Capote

“The Man-Moth” (1936) “The Unbeliever” (1938) “The Fish” (1940) “At the Fishhouses” (1948) “Questions of Travel” (1956) “Filling Station” (1964) “Sestina” (1964) “In the Waiting Room” (1971)

90

In Cold Blood (1965)

John Cheever “The Enormous Radio” (1947) The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) “The Death of Justina” (1961) “The Swimmer” (1964)

vi

96

List of Writers and Works Included

Ralph Ellison

107

“King of the Bingo Game” (1944) “Flying Home” (1944) Invisible Man (1952) “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion” (1953) “The World and the Jug” (1963, 1964) “A Party Down the Square” (1996)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Allen Ginsberg

121

A Raisin in the Sun (1959) “On Summer” (1960) The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964)

178

Catch-22 (1961) Something Happened (1974)

131

Shirley Jackson

191

“The Lottery” (1948)

Randall Jarrell

145

Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976)

Lorraine Hansberry

163

“Frederick Douglass” (1946) “Homage to the Empress of the Blues” (1962) “Middle Passage” (1962) “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sundays” (1962) “Runagate Runagate” (1962) “Summertime and the Living . . .” (1962) “Those Winter Sundays” (1962) “Tour 5” (1962) “The Night-Blooming Cereus” (1972) “Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers” (1975)

Joseph Heller

“On Burroughs’ Work” (1954) “A Supermarket in California” (1955) “Sunflower Sutra” (1955) “America” (1956) “Howl” (1956) “To Aunt Rose” (1958) “Ego Confession” (1974)

Alex Haley

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964)

Robert Hayden

“Constantly Risking Absurdity” (1958) “Dove Sta Amore” (1958) “I Am Waiting” (1958) “In Golden Gate Park That Day” (1958) “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See” (1958) “The Old Italians Dying” (1979) “A Dark Portrait” (1984) “Monet’s Lilies Shuddering” (1988)

vii

151

196

“90 North” (1942) “Losses” (1945) “Protocols” (1945) “Second Air Force” (1945) “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945) “Next Day” (1965) “Well Water” (1965)

Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957) The Dharma Bums (1958) The Subterraneans (1958) “The Vanishing American Hobo” (1960)

206

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Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Ken Kesey

218

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) Sometimes a Great Notion (1964)

Martin Luther King, Jr.

227

Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) “I Have a Dream” (1963) “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) Why We Can’t Wait (1964) Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (1969)

John Knowles

Bernard Malamud 243

A Separate Peace (1959) Peace Breaks Out (1981)

Harper Lee

252

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Denise Levertov

261

“Illustrious Ancestors” (1958) “To the Snake” (1960) “A Solitude” (1961) “September 1961” (1961) “The Jacob’s Ladder” (1961) “In Mind” (1964) “What Were They Like?” (1967) “A Woman Alone” (1978) “Death in Mexico” (1978) “The May Mornings” (1982) “Caedmon” (1987) “Making Peace” (1987)

Robert Lowell “Colloquy in Black Rock” (1946) “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (1946)

“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” (1946) “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (1959) “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” (1959) “Skunk Hour” (1959) “For the Union Dead” (1960) “Night Sweat” (1963) “For Theodore Roethke” (1967) “Near the Ocean” (1967)

296

“The First Seven Years” (1950) The Natural (1952) “The Magic Barrel” (1954) “Black Is My Favorite Color” (1963) “The Jewbird” (1963)

Malcolm X

310

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (1965) Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965) By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X (1970)

Paule Marshall

322

Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” (1976) Praisesong for the Widow (1983)

Arthur Miller 279

Death of a Salesman (1949) The Crucible (1953) A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956)

336

List of Writers and Works Included

N. Scott Momaday

352

House Made of Dawn (1968) The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) The Names: A Memoir (1976)

Flannery O’Connor

366

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953) “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1953) “A Circle in the Fire” (1954) “The Displaced Person” (1954, revised 1955) “Good Country People” (1955) “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1961) “Revelation” (1964)

Theodore Roethke “The Adamant” (1941) “The Light Comes Brighter” (1941) “Big Wind” (1948) “Cuttings”/“Cuttings (later)” (1948) “My Papa’s Waltz” (1948) “Root Cellar” (1948) “The Lost Son” (1948) “Weed Puller” (1948) “The Waking” (1953) “Elegy” (1958) “Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze” (1958) “The Far Field” (1964)

Philip Roth Sylvia Plath

383

“Morning Song” (1961) “Blackberrying” (1961) “For a Fatherless Son” (1962) “Daddy” (1962) “Fever 103°” (1962) “Ariel” (1962) “Lady Lazarus” (1962) “Child” (1963) “Mirror” (1963) The Bell Jar (1963)

Chaim Potok

402

We the Living (1936) Anthem (1938) The Fountainhead (1943) Atlas Shrugged (1957)

412

451

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (1950) The Catcher in the Rye (1951) “Teddy” (1953) “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955) Franny and Zooey (1961)

Anne Sexton Ayn Rand

438

Goodbye, Columbus (1959) “Defender of the Faith” (1959) Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) American Pastoral (1997) The Human Stain (2000)

J. D. Salinger

The Chosen (1967) The Promise (1969) My Name Is Asher Lev (1972)

425

“Her Kind” (1960) “Housewife” (1962) The Death of the Fathers (1962) “The Starry Night” (1962) The Truth the Dead Know (1962)

466

ix

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Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

“Young” (1962) “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman” (1966) “Somewhere in Africa” (1966)

May Swenson

479

“By Morning” (1952) “Deciding” (1954) “Question” (1954) “The Centaur” (1954) “Water Picture” (1955) “The Truth Is Forced” (1961) “The Woods at Night” (1962) “Blue”/“A Trellis for R.” (1967)

John Updike

Eudora Welty

491

Rabbit, Run (1960) “A&P” (1961) “Separating” (1975) The Witches of Eastwick (1984) “Brother Grasshopper” (1987) “The Brown Chest” (1992)

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

504

“Bearded Oaks” (1942) All the King’s Men (1946)

521

535

“Petrified Man” (1939) “Why I Live at the P.O.” (1941) “A Worn Path” (1941) “The Wide Net” (1942) “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (1963) One Writer’s Beginnings (1984)

Richard Wilbur

“Report on the Barnhouse Effect” (1950) “Harrison Bergeron” (1961) Cat’s Cradle (1963) Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973)

Robert Penn Warren

“Gold Glade” (1957) Audubon: A Vision (1969) “American Portrait: Old Style” (1976) “Evening Hawk” (1977) “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” (1980) “After the Dinner Party” (1985) “Mortal Limit” (1985)

548

“The Beautiful Changes” (1947) “A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness” (1950) “Ceremony” (1950) “The Death of a Toad” (1950) “Years-End” (1950) “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (1956) “The Mind-Reader” (1976)

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie (1944) A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) The Night of the Iguana (1961)

559

Series Preface

T

After each subentry on a work is a set of questions for discussion and/or writing. Another set of broader discussion questions appears near the end of each author entry, followed by a bibliography. The entire five-volume set therefore contains more than 1000 discussion questions. These questions make up perhaps the most important and useful features of the set, encouraging further creative thought and helping students get started on their own writing. Many of the questions reference not only the subject literary work or author but also related works and authors, thus helping students to make additional literary connections, as emphasized by the literature standards. The authors and works included in the set were selected primarily from among those most popular in the high school classrooms—that is, those often featured in secondary-school literary anthologies and textbooks; those often appearing on age-appropriate reading lists; and those most often searched for in Facts On File’s online literary database Bloom’s Literature Online, used primarily in high schools. In addition, we have endeavored to include a range of writers from different backgrounds in all periods, as well as writers who, though not perhaps among the very most popular today, appear to have been unjustly neglected and are gaining in popularity. No selection could be perfect, and those writers favored by scholars and critics are not always as popular in the high school classroom, but the general editor and volumes editors have attempted to make the set’s coverage as useful to students as possible. Above all, we hope that this set serves not only to instruct but also to inspire students with the love of literature shared by all the editors and contributors who worked on this set.

he Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers is a unique reference intended to help high school students meet standards for literature education and prepare themselves for literature study in college. It offers extensive entries on important authors, as well as providing additional interpretive helps for students and their teachers. The set has been designed and written in the context of the national standards for English language arts, created by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, the two professional organizations that have the most at stake in high school language arts education (see http:// www.ncte.org/standards). The volume editors and many of the contributors to this set not only are university scholars but also have experience in secondary school literature education, ranging from working as readers of Advanced Placement examinations, to developing high school literature curricula, to having taught in high school English classrooms. Although the volume editors all have extensive experience as scholars and university professors, they all have strong roots in high school education and have drawn on their experience to ensure that entries are stylistically appealing and contain the necessary content for students. The set’s five volumes are organized chronologically, as many literature textbooks and anthologies are. This system is convenient for students and also facilitates cross-disciplinary study, increasingly common in high schools. For example, a section on the Civil War in history class might be accompanied by the study of Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane in English class. To help students find what they need, each volume contains two lists of all the authors included in the set: one organized chronologically and the other alphabetically. Within each volume, authors are presented alphabetically. Each author entry contains a biography and then subentries on the author’s major works.

Patricia M. Gantt

xi

Volume Introduction

A

duction play an ever-increasing role, establish more humane ways of organizing society and living with one another? It was during this 25-year span that we learned the horrific details of Adolf Hitler’s “fi nal solution”; witnessed the Nuremberg trials; integrated public schools, colleges, and universities; met such American civil rights heroes and heroines as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks; fought the Korean and cold wars; witnessed the sexual revolution; grew to love television; and sent astronauts to the Moon. While we prospered as a society, we confronted bitter truths about our own inhumane actions, both at home and abroad, and about the underlying issues that plagued and continue to haunt American society: xenophobia, racism, sexism, classism. During this key period of American history, authors wrestled with concerns central to our identity. Thus, the voices of great American writers from this period range from deep skepticism to unbridled optimism and encompass a variety of perspectives hitherto unknown in America’s literature: Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Albee’s comic, absurd imaginings; Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams’s southern grotesqueries; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X’s demands for justice; Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Ginsberg’s radical “Beatnik” creations; Philip Roth’s sex-obsessed fictions; Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton’s confessional poetry. To examine this literature is to confront paradox. Here we encounter literature’s wily nature, its resistance to simple interpretations, and its reflection of what we sometimes refer to as the ensuing action: the many things that are influential in history making. There is no doubt that we crave solutions, seek answers, and rely upon writers to help us identify what we might hold on to, what we might let go of, and what we need to make anew. But the literature from this period focuses on the fragmented experience of postwar America, one that

s with the founding of the United States and the fighting of the Civil War, the period of 1945–70 was a time of civic unrest. Great writers from this era witnessed the seismic social changes taking place—everything from the sprawling of American cities to the end of Jim Crow laws—and used language to reflect the social order and to challenge it, undermine it, and change it. During this time literature became a far more democratic enterprise. Drawing upon a wide range of voices and cultures, American writers, as bards of an emerging culture, forged meaning out of isolation, suffering, violence, and pain. They recorded the turbulent past, lamented the broken present, and envisioned a better future, all the while presenting us with remarkable aesthetic creations. Literature from this period (often called the postwar period) not only helped defi ne an age but also helped shape an emerging American consciousness. Important, socially conscious books from this period, such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, both of which were best sellers that raised moral questions and addressed sensitive issues of race, have been read by generations of American readers and writers. Other major writers of the time, such as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Randall Jarrell, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Ayn Rand, John Updike, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wilbur, also raised perplexing questions. They questioned what we have known and can know and have done and should have done and what we might do tomorrow. This period contained the seeds from which our present multicultural society has grown. When we read postwar American literature, rather than fi nd defi nitive moral truths or easy answers, we confront questions: Who are we? How do we respond to global confl icts, mass genocide, nuclear proliferation, and civil unrest? How can we, as a nation in which technology and mass pro-

xii

Volume Introduction

differs from the experience of the fi rst half of the 20th century. Many writers from the fi rst half of the century employed complex systems of symbols and intricate narrative techniques while attempting to elevate art to the status of religion. These writers, whom we often refer to as modernists, viewed art as a substitute for failed meaning-making systems. Modernist writers made things new in an effort to correct what many thought was a fallen world, where our connection with the divine had been severed. Many of them thought that only art could reconnect us with what had been lost and offer a chance for redemption. Here we fi nd William Faulkner hunting for “verities” in “The Bear,” F. Scott Fitzgerald watching above The Great Gatsby’s Valley of the Ashes, and Zora Neale Hurston weaving folklore and myth into Their Eyes Were Watching God. While such literature attempts to provide a moral corrective, postwar literature is far less attached to sacred truths. Challenging accepted conventions and what we normally conceive of as formal literature, postwar American writers often adopted new language and employed novel forms. For example, Edward Albee’s The American Dream (1961) follows what John Becker calls “a minimalist approach to plot, characterization, stage setting, and dialogue, which is fi lled with clichéd phrases and meaningless exchanges.” In doing so, Albee criticizes what he sees as an illusion, the postwar American ideal of happiness, one predicated on attaining material goods, wealth, and status. In the tradition of Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albee provides social commentary, toying with our expectations, foiling them at every turn, and ultimately leading us to reimagine our lives. So too do the “beatniks”—Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg—refract postwar life, forcing us to look at the dark side of the American dream and speaking out on a range of issues, from drug use to the Vietnam War to the nuclear arms race to gay rights. Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems (1956) assails us with the percussive language of the streets, decries social injustice, and speaks for a generation disillusioned by the ter-

xiii

ror of Joseph McCarthy, who sought to purge the social order of dissidents, often labeled by McCarthy as communists. Ginsberg’s poetry survived an obscenity trial that became a landmark case for the freedom of speech. Writing about what Earen Rast calls “the control American cultural values exert on individual psyches,” Arthur Miller not only created the McCarthy-trial allegory The Crucible, but also gave us Death of a Salesman, where Willy Loman’s ideals are “embodied within the American mythos—self-reliance, economic salvation, individual freedom.” These principles, taken by many as American’s promise of freedom, become nightmares for Miller. As Rast tells us, “Cleaved from these values, Willy is an empty shell. In the fi nal confrontation, Biff eviscerates not only everything Willy considers meaningful, but also the distinction between American ‘reality’ and American mythology.” Known for his wit, comically absurd works, and humanitarian vision, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.—perhaps the greatest American satirist since Mark Twain— became an icon for the “baby-boomer” generation, those born during post–World War II years. Idolized by the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, Kurt Vonnegut spoke to a generation disillusioned by ineffective institutions, the nuclear arms race, and the Vietnam War. Although some consider him to be a period writer, Vonnegut’s works continue to be read and taught, especially his powerful exploration of the bombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five. Although Vonnegut abhorred being called a science-fiction writer, he created experimental, fantastic worlds populated with grotesque characters in order to address contemporary sociopolitical concerns. As Vonnegut says, “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a fi le drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ . . . and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal” (Wampeters 1). Questioning who we are, why we are here, and what it is that we as social beings should be doing, Vonnegut’s bitterly satirical works depict a world in which God is strangely absent, where stock characters and fantastical creations negotiate chance

xiv Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

events, often amid alien creatures and with the aid of time-traveling machines and horrific forms of technology. Vonnegut comments on the limits of reason, the illusion of progress, the horrors of war, the absurdity of nuclear proliferation, the reality of class differences, the construct of race, and the need for human beings to erect systems of meaning, such as the religion of Bokonon in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. Combining high hilarity with what some consider pessimistic depictions of humanity’s frailty and self-centered tendencies, Vonnegut examines the delusions that distract us from real, pressing social concerns. By lauding the power of fiction to reenvision our place in the world, and by challenging us to create a better, more humane society, Vonnegut earned himself a secure place in the canon of American fiction. While Vonnegut addressed social concerns as a comic writer, Robert Penn Warren addressed them as a tragic writer. In his great novel All the King’s Men, he uses the experience of Jack Burden to examine American society and the American political system. Jack is ambivalent about his own actions and interpretations and is ambivalent about his mentor, Willie Stark, the literary counterpart of the real Louisiana governor Huey Long. Yet Jack accepts “the awful responsibility of Time”: how his own ideas, actions, and words have meanings that affect everyone joined in the “web of being.” As the narrative progresses and as Jack learns about the complex web of the political world, we also learn about Willie’s disillusionment and about the many questionable decisions he makes. As do Sophocles’ Oedipus and many other tragic figures, Willie Stark fails to reach his potential. Ultimately, All the King’s Men explores such grand themes as the way history affects the present, the inherent dangers of power (which in the novel is portrayed as a corruptive, blinding force), the alienation of the individual in the modern world, and the duty we all have to understand ourselves, come to terms with our past, and accept responsibility for our lives and the ways they affect others. These themes emerge as Jack Burden realizes his identity against the mercurial rise and fall of Willie Stark. History functions in the novel as the backdrop against which War-

ren explores our lives and the tragic nature of the human condition. During this same period, much American poetry was confessional in nature, especially the work of Anne Sexton, May Swenson, and Sylvia Plath. By introducing unheard voices of those who suffer from roles imposed upon them by society, these authors cause us to consider the condition of women in postwar America. Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar portrays a suffering woman artist fighting with her own demons, laboring to know herself, searching for an acceptable role to play, and seeking fulfi llment and joy. As does the work of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, the novel speaks to those trapped with self-doubts, groping to fi nd a way through the seemingly endless corridors of the mind. It deals with understanding, the struggle between self and other, interior and exterior, with its dream-fi lled visions and nightmarish pain. As Esther says near the end of the novel, “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.” As Esther does, we all seek a stable self, one free of the psychological and social knots that bind us. While the novel depicts a suffocating world, it also conveys the power of art, the way it can not only lead us to empathize with others but also help us to understand ourselves. Whether we choose to read The Bell Jar as an autobiography, as fiction, as a psychological portrait, as a representation of women in the 1950s, as a sociological essay on the sexual experience of women, or for the style of the narration and construction of the novel’s form, which in many ways mirrors the disjunctive experience of its narrator, we empathize with Esther, who, as we have, has an emphatic need to confront radical instability and make sense of the world. The literature from this period includes some of the fi nest African-American orators, poets, dramatists, and fiction writers in the American literary tradition: Gwendolyn Brooks; Ralph Ellison; Alex Haley; Lorraine Hansberry; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Malcolm X; and Paule Marshall. Gwendolyn Brooks’s 1945 collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, established her place in the American

Volume Introduction

literary canon. To understand Brooks’s eloquence and her ability to speak not only for herself but also for the dispossessed, we might consider her poem “the mother,” a powerful work that deals with the aftermath of an abortion. The speaker of the poem, the mother, is divided: On the one hand, she affi rms the decisions she has made; on the other hand, she questions those same decisions, groping for words to express the clashing feelings she harbors, laboring to use language to express how “the truth is to be said.” The mother’s memory and imagination link her to what she has lost, leading her to conjure the things her aborted children might have done and to speak directly to them throughout the poem. In this way, the poem has a dreamlike quality; the mother grapples with reality but also fantasizes about what might have been, creating an overall nostalgic tone that is suffused with pathos, that strange artistic quality that evokes tenderness, pity, and sorrow all at once. As in many of the other poems in A Street in Bronzeville, Brooks here deals with children, the innocent who suffer in an adult world and who grapple for space in a harsh environment. Yet despite Brook’s interest in children and her compassion for their plight, “the mother” focuses on the consciousness of the would-be child bearer, the one who has elected to not carry children into a bleak world. The lost children stand as reminders of the harshness of the impoverished surroundings the speaker inhabits; the mother expresses concern for those who might have been introduced to those surroundings. Richard Wright, author of Native Son and proponent of Brooks’s poetry, read “the mother” and thought the subject inappropriate for A Street in Bronzeville. While Wright may have been correct about the climate of the times, it is difficult to imagine a more effective poem. By presenting a woman who has aborted her children in a stark, realistic manner, Brooks offers a moving depiction of the destitute urban woman. Even though this woman regrets

xv

her actions, she keeps the lost alive in her memory, weighing what might have been, what she believes, what she knows, what she struggles with, what she has lost, and what does not make sense to her. Thus, the mother is a complex character, a woman who inhabits a difficult world, where day-to-day survival means choosing from a host of real possibilities that defy any abstract, idealized notion of what it means to be human. While they may differ in style and outlook, the works examined in this volume all place great demands on the reader. At times it seems as if the reader herself is responsible for reconstructing the world in which the characters live. A prime example is the work of M. Scott Momaday, particularly his House Made of Dawn, which marked the beginning of what Kenneth Lincoln calls the “Native American Renaissance.” Momaday’s characters are from decimated cultures. While they celebrate the heritage of their ancestors and draw strength from the wonders of the natural world, they live broken lives, ever reaching to the past and envisioning a future in which they may be whole. While American literature before this era may have imagined that the American experience was somehow universal, postwar literature recognizes the many and varied elements of American society, as well the necessity of giving voice to the voiceless. To begin this process is to know the pain of birth, the daily ritual of confronting, examining, representing, critiquing, and satirizing that describes the process of literary creation. More explicitly than ever before, the imaginative literature of the period 1945–70 is wedded to American society and culture. With this close cultural relationship in mind, this volume examines many stunning aesthetic creations and their response to and influence upon the American way of life, revealing the way great American writers have fashioned our story. Blake Hobby

Edward Albee (1928–

)

[The] health of a nation, a society, can be determined by the art it demands. We have insisted of television and our movies that they not have anything to do with anything, that they be our never-never land; and if we demand this same function of our live theatre, what will be left of the visual-auditory arts—save the dance (in which nobody talks) and music (to which nobody listens)? (“Which Theatre Is the Absurd One?” New York Times Magazine, 25 February 1962)

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famous theater performers; the Albees entertained many celebrities at their mansion, including the comedians Jimmy Durante, William Gaxton, and Ed Wynn and the Academy Award winner Walter Pidgeon. During his adolescence Albee wrote poetry; he fi nished his fi rst play, a sex farce named Aliqueen, at the age of 12. Despite his literary interests and productivity, Albee was expelled from three private schools before settling in at the Choate School in Connecticut, where he wrote poems, short stories, a play, and a novel with the encouragement of his teachers there. His fi rst published work, a poem, appeared in the Texas magazine the Kaleidoscope in 1945. Graduating from Choate, he attended Trinity College for a year and a half before he was dismissed for nonattendance (1947); the same year, his mother found out he was homosexual and forced him to leave home. Moving to the Greenwich Village area of New York City, Albee worked a variety of jobs before he inherited the majority of his grandmother’s trust fund at the age of 30. These jobs included a program-writing stint at a radio station, an office position at an advertising agency, sales, and a job delivering telegrams for Western Union. During this time, Albee immersed himself in 1950s bohemian culture, viewing art exhibits, mingling with other writers and artists, and attending Broadway shows. Three years after he arrived in New York, Albee moved in with his lover and mentor, William

dward Franklin Albee, one of America’s foremost dramatists, was born on March 12, 1928, either in Virginia or in Washington, D.C. Two weeks after his birth, Frances and Reed Albee, the inheritor of a large stake in Keith-Albee Orpheum, a coast-to-coast chain of vaudeville theaters, adopted him. Edward grew up in their affluent home in Larchmont, New York. From the age of six Albee knew Frances and Reed were not his biological parents; he later claimed he was adopted to fulfi ll his ailing grandfather’s wish for a grandson. With a controlling mother and emotionally distant father, Albee felt alienated during his early years. This feeling of abandonment greatly influenced his art, inspiring the biting satire and profound sense of estrangement found in many of his works. Author of more than 30 plays—three of which garnered the Pulitzer Prize in drama— Albee led a generation of American playwrights throughout the 1960s with his overtly critical, often controversial dramas. Responding to the American dream–inspired, conformist culture of the 1950s, Albee shocked audiences, rendering the failure of social institutions—especially the family—in the moment of their collapse. At an early age Edward was sent in the family limousine to Broadway matinees, where he developed a love for the stage. He formed an especially strong relationship with his nanny, who exposed him to opera and classical music. Edward also met

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Flanagan, a composer and music critic for the Herald Tribune. Though none of Albee’s work from this 10-year period has been published, he purportedly wrote volumes of material. Seeking advice, Albee showed some of his poems to the noted poet W. H. Auden and the novelist-playwright Thornton Wilder. At the recommendation of Wilder, Albee decided to concentrate solely on playwriting, which proved to be a sound course. On the eve of his 30th birthday Albee sat down at his kitchen table with a stolen Western Union typewriter and wrote The Zoo Story (1958) as a birthday present to himself. A one-hour, one-act play with two characters and a lengthy narrative, The Zoo Story script was turned down by New York producers but soon was produced in Berlin, where it was performed for the fi rst time on September 28, 1959, in German to critical acclaim. Premiering in New York in early 1960, The Zoo Story established Albee’s reputation and won him a Village Voice Obie award. Performed alongside Samuel Beckett’s short play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), The Zoo Story marked the beginning of Albee’s association with the “theater of the absurd” movement. This movement in mid-century drama—taking some of its inspiration from French existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus—focused on the failure of humanity’s attempts to construct rational explanations and ordering principles of the world. According to this perspective, posing methodical and tidy answers to the larger questions we encounter as mortal, suffering beings—questions regarding our seeming lack of purpose, the absence or presence of God, and so forth—breeds ignorance, disguising the fundamental absurdity of life. The challenge for the absurdist playwright then is either to strip commonly held illusions from the action of the play or to create a play that tries to make its audience aware of the inadequacy of these illusions. Though most of the playwrights who belong to this movement—Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and others—created plays with surrealistic elements, Albee’s works are often characterized as more “realistic,” depicting concrete situations that are often jarring but less

pessimistic than those of his European absurdist counterparts. Four months after The Zoo Story’s New York debut, Albee’s The Death of Bessie Smith (1960) and The Sandbox (1960) were performed. Premiering in Germany, The Death of Bessie Smith was inspired by the back of an album cover, which related the tragic circumstances surrounding the famous blues diva’s demise. Dealing with racism in American culture, the play contains two interwoven plots with eight scenes in five different locations. The Sandbox was written as a commission for the Festival of Two Worlds at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, where it was not performed. Instead, the play was fi rst produced in New York in 1960. Rather than writing completely new material for the festival commission, Albee used characters from his work in progress, The American Dream (1961), and placed them in a different context. Lasting only 14 minutes, this play resembles works by absurdist playwrights, for instance, in the constant presence of a young man performing gym exercises in the background, who (as the stage directions indicate) represents the “Angel of Death.” This fantastical figure deviates from what most theatergoers consider plausible. It is ironic that Albee’s most implausible scenario at that date had the largest number of elements drawn directly from his life: Albee modeled the play’s central character after his recently deceased grandmother (to whom he dedicated the play) and created dismal caricatures of his adoptive parents in the characters Mommy and Daddy. The strategy of using nonspecific names based on broad character types enhances the degree of abstraction in The Sandbox and is employed by Albee in many of his plays. The American Dream (1961) shares these autobiographical elements with The Sandbox. Both contain theater of the absurd thematic and stylistic elements. Abandoning the realism of The Zoo Story and The Death of Bessie Smith, Albee followed a minimalist, abstract approach to plot, characterization, stage setting, and dialogue, which is fi lled with clichéd phrases and meaningless exchanges. The triviality and callous detachment of the characters, with the exception of the grandmother, foreground the artificial and dehumanizing nature of Daddy and

Edward Albee

Mommy’s illusion—the 1950s American ideal of the modern, “normal” nuclear family. The overriding concerns of Mommy and Daddy, especially in The American Dream, center on material goods and conforming to rigid expectations. Albee attacks such indifference, implying that American consumerism and conformity create a sense of isolation. Opening in January 1961, The American Dream was double-billed with Albee’s operatic adaptation of the Herman Melville short story “Bartleby” (1853). After poor reception of the latter, it was paired with The Death of Bessie Smith. Both of these plays won the Foreign Press Association Award. In the same year Albee traveled with a production of The Zoo Story to parts of South America on a cultural-exchange program. During this trip, Albee’s adoptive father, Reed, passed away. Returning to New York, Albee completed his fi rst full-length play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in January 1962. The play garnered Albee worldwide recognition and won numerous prizes despite reviewers’ polarized reactions. A psychological portrait of a delusional and dysfunctional marriage that, as Albee suggests, can be read as an allegory for contemporary America or the decline of the West, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? sparked a critical controversy. Running for 664 performances, it won five Tony Awards and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play and narrowly missed winning the Pulitzer Prize. When the Pulitzer Prize drama panel voted to award Albee the year’s drama prize, the Pulitzer Committee overrode their choice because the play did not represent a “wholesome” view of American life. The play’s success on Broadway earned him an invitation to the White House, where he met President John F. Kennedy. A 1966 screen adaptation of the play directed by Mike Nichols and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton received even more positive press than the play. In 1967 the cast and crew won five Academy Awards; the play was nominated in eight other categories. After the fi nancial success of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee championed playwrights excluded from the mainstream commercial theater. Fostering a generation of experimentalism and cre-

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ative independence in American drama, he helped form the Playwrights Unit in Greenwich Village, a workshop that subsidized more than 100 performances of works by unknown young writers. Instrumental to the “off-off Broadway” movement of the 1960s, the workshop supported controversial and recognized dramatists, including the Pulitzer Prize winners Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson. Albee’s strikingly autobiographical play A Delicate Balance premiered on Broadway in 1966 and won the Pulitzer Prize. The play centers once again on an upper-class couple resembling Albee’s foster parents, but with an additional character based on his alcoholic aunt Jane. Focusing on the sanity of each character as he or she relates to the sense of familial belonging they all share, Albee returned in A Delicate Balance to themes found in his early work, especially the emptiness and frailty of social institutions that people construct to shield themselves from terrifying realities. Tony Richardson directed Katherine Hepburn and Paul Scofield in a 1973 fi lm version of the play. Finishing another adaptation (Giles Cooper’s play Everything in the Garden) in 1967, Albee wrote his two most experimental works: Box (1968) and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1968), which were designed to be performed together. Box is an offstage monologue bemoaning the current state of art and society while the audience stares at a box. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung has three characters—the Long-Winded Lady, Chairman Mao, and the Old Lady—reciting monologues that are related to the Box monologue. Box was supposed to be performed before and after Quotations. Albee intended the performance to be musical in structure, the speeches functioning as notes or motifs that converge and diverge around the themes of social and moral decline in the Box monologue. This experimentation in dramatic form did not win Albee a large audience, but it demonstrated his creative independence and integrity as an artist. The 1970s and 1980s marked a drop in Albee’s prolific productivity of the prior decade. His next play, 1971’s All Over, was inspired by the death of his longtime friend and mentor, William Flanagan.

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Originally entitled “Death,” All Over centers on the imminent demise of a doctor in his screened hospital bed. Albee explores the complex and often selfish reactions people have to death, focusing on the interactions that transpire between the doctor’s attendant family and friends. All Over’s planned companion piece, “Life,” was revised into Albee’s second Pulitzer winner, Seascape (1975). Having the closest thing to a happy ending in Albee’s work, Seascape is set on a beach where an elderly retired couple contemplates their future when they are accosted by two large lizards hoping to make the transition from sea to land. The lizards, also a couple, are invited to stay with their human counterparts at the play’s close. By dramatizing a confrontation between humans and creatures on the brink of change, the play introduces the concept of evolution into Albee’s ongoing exploration of life and death. After completing two short experimental plays in 1977 (Counting the Ways and Listening), Albee wrote a number of plays that, when initially produced, were not successful: The Lady from Dubuque (1980), the 1981 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955), and The Man Who Had Three Arms (1982). This, in effect, forced Albee from Broadway for over a decade. During this hiatus he wrote four plays that were performed at American university theaters and overseas. Two one-acts from this period, Finding the Sun (1983) and Marriage Play (1987), found their way to New York stages in the mid-1990s. The former play is significant in that it is Albee’s fi rst work to deal directly with homosexuality. In 1989 Albee’s adoptive mother, Frances, passed away, leaving none of her assets to him. This scathing rejection prompted Albee to write the two-act play Three Tall Women (1991), his most autobiographical work. Perhaps an attempt by Albee to put his antagonistic relationship with his foster mother behind him, the fi rst act is set in A’s (an elderly rich woman’s) bedroom. Two women, B and C, attend A as she tells various stories about her past. A has a stroke at the end of act 1; the second act opens with the three characters in a hospital room gathered around a mannequin corpse. Each now represents

A at different stages in her life, and the discussion that ensues includes an examination of their stormy relationship with their son, who enters and leaves without saying a word. The conversation ends with a debate about which time in their life was the happiest. A wins the argument, insisting that the end was the happiest, prompting all three to exhale. Running for 582 performances, Three Tall Women resurrected Albee’s career, winning him his third Pulitzer, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and an Obie Lifetime Achievement Award. Since his reemergence Albee has written the experimental and improvisatory Fragments (1993), The Play about the Baby (1998), and a homage to the sculptor Louise Nevelson entitled Occupant (2002). Marking his return to Broadway, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002) is one of Albee’s most controversial plays. The play’s premise centers on Martin’s estranged relationship with his wife, Stevie, and homosexual son, Billy, after Martin admits to being strongly attracted to a goat named Sylvia. Referencing the ancient Greek sacrifice of a goat to the god Dionysus that precedes tragedy, the play ends as Stevie kills the goat and takes it back to their apartment. Winning a Tony Award for best play among other distinctions, the play explores the unpredictable nature of love and its often harsh consequences. In 2005 Albee received another Lifetime Achievement Award (this time from the American Theater Wing) and published a collection of essays dating back to 1960 entitled Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays 1960 to 2005.

The Zoo Story (1959) The Zoo Story (Berlin, 1959; New York, 1960) is a one-act play with two characters: Peter, a middle class publishing executive reading on a bench in Central Park, and Jerry, a lonely bohemian man in his late 30s, who says he has been to the zoo. As the two talk and Jerry asks persistent questions, the audience sees how the two characters differ. In the midst of their conversation, Jerry abandons his interrogatorlike posture to deliver a lengthy monologue entitled “The Story of Jerry and the

Edward Albee

Dog,” which deals with his landlady and her black dog Jerry has bribed and poisoned. Justifying his actions, Jerry explains that his desire to make the dog understand, through acts of love and hate, is motivated by his profound isolation from man and animal alike. Peter and Jerry then fight, and Jerry ultimately intentionally impales himself on a knife in Peter’s hands. Jerry, dying, explains he planned the whole encounter, which was a reenactment of a scene he witnessed at the zoo. Albee places many of the play’s critical lines in Jerry’s mouth. Thus, his ideas and language not only critique a character but also make social statements, harsh critiques that rang sharply in a conservative age enjoying material goods and prosperity, an age focused on the home front and terrified about the cold war and the spread of communism. Notably, Jerry’s lines target Peter’s middle-class, “bourgeois” values and the conventional role Peter plays. Thematically, The Zoo Story deals with failed communication in a complacent society characterized by anonymity. Throughout the play Jerry tries to communicate across many socially constructed boundaries, sharing with Peter his anguish, his distinctive way of knowing. Through the subtle use of foreshadowing and Jerry’s explicit linking of the situation to his confrontation with the dog, Albee suggests that the entire action of the play lies within the confi nes of the zoo Jerry has visited. Thus, the two characters can be seen as animals separated from one another by cages that inhibit communication. Jerry, as he announces in his fi rst line of dialogue, is intimately acquainted with this isolation and desperately tries to convey it to Peter, a man comfortably deceived by his middle-class nuclear family status. Through Jerry’s suicide—an act motivated by his loneliness and desire to force Peter from his complacent position—Albee comments that sacrifice is essential in overcoming and conveying an understanding of the illusions that mutually bind the characters, and, by analogy, humanity. Through the exchange the two men share, Albee renders the power of art to overcome such illusions, both the ability for language to mediate the many paradoxes that the two characters embody and the power of the stage to challenge the status quo.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. Jerry is a “beatnik character,” an antiestablishment, countercultural hero who resembles characters and ideas of Beat generation writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. Consult an encyclopedia or trustworthy Web site and learn about the Beats. What Beat values does Jerry portray? What outlook on society does Jerry embody? Explain your answer, giving support from the play. 2. At the conclusion of “The Story of Jerry and the Dog,” Jerry states, “I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves, independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves; and I have learned that the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion” (Zoo Story 43–44). Beyond Jerry’s treatment of the dog, what do his actions teach? Why are his actions significant? 3. Jerry claims in his dying remarks that Peter has been “dispossessed” of his bench in the process of “defending [his] honor,” that he is no longer a vegetable anymore, but an animal like Jerry (61). The predicament the two characters are left in at the end of the play is remarkably similar to George and Martha’s relation to their dead imaginary son at the close of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Both Peter and George and Martha have defended their dignity in the face of severe scrutiny and lost their “bench”—in the latter case, the comforting lie of having a child. Nonetheless, Albee implies in both cases that these characters have progressed in some way to a better state. What have they gained? What should we make of Jerry’s pronouncement that, in such encounters, “what is gain is loss” (44)?

The Sandbox (1960) One of the shortest of Albee’s plays to date, The Sandbox was written for, but never performed at, the Spoleto Festival and uses several characters who later appear in The American Dream: a hostile, cruel mother; an ineffectual, powerless father; and a genuine grandmother terrorized by her own

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daughter. Albee dedicated The Sandbox to his recently deceased maternal grandmother, whose dramatic likeness appears in both plays. Simple characterization, a minimalist stage setting, and surreal elements characterize The Sandbox, which, with its empty dialogue and meaningless and virtually nonexistent plot, is an absurdist play that parallels the works of Samuel Beckett. As do Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), Albee’s Sandbox characters engage in inane conversation as they wait. While in Beckett’s play the two vaudevillesque bums wait for the mysterious “Godot,” who never arrives, in Albee’s play the characters wait for Grandma’s death. A one-act play taking less than 15 minutes to perform, The Sandbox takes place on a beach where a handsome Young Man exercises behind a large raked sandbox. He says hello to Mommy and Daddy, who arrive with Grandma and have a Musician to ease Grandma’s dying in the sandbox, her resting place. After telling the audience about her sad past and talking with the Young Man about his biceps and acting, Grandma buries herself in sand and plays dead so Mommy and Daddy will leave. After they depart swiftly, Grandma, who resembles Winnie, the central character of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1960) buried in sand throughout the play, realizes she cannot move under the sand she has piled on herself. At this point, the Young Man tells Grandma he is the Angel of Death and kisses her on the forehead; she dies after consoling him about his acting ability. Contributing to the play’s absurdity, the actors break character and comment upon the play itself. In literary studies this technique is often called selfreflexivity or self-referentiality, a technique that calls attention to the way the play is constructed and breaks with realistic conventions. The result of using such techniques is that the audience reflects on the artificiality of the play. While such devices can be found in literature from all ages, including William’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603), in which the title character enacts a play within a play to comment upon the action taking place, this technique is one of the hallmarks of postmodern style. Toward the middle of the play, Grandma, cruelly

ignored by her family, addresses the audience to complain about how she is being treated (149). After “breaking the fourth wall” (a phrase referring to the usual, invisible barrier between stage and audience), Grandma proceeds to talk with the Young Man in a manner that slowly reveals that they are aware of being actors on a stage. This culminates in the Young Man’s hilarious line: “Uh . . . ma’am; I . . . I have a line here” (157). The most interesting example of self-awareness in the play is Grandma’s direction of lighting cues. For example, she commands that it be nighttime by shouting offstage, “Shouldn’t it be getting dark now dear?” (152). These acts demonstrate that Grandma is fully aware: When addressing the audience or controlling the set, Grandma sees past the illusion of her situation and is able to interact with it. In a play fi lled with the clichéd and unconvincing language of Mommy and Daddy, only Grandma’s lines contain genuine emotion: Her language is expressive when she tells the audience about her suffering or uses her last breath to comfort the Young Man. Though she does not control her fate in the ceremony, a ceremony presided over by Mommy, Grandma interacts with everyone in the theater. Defi ned by the initial stage note as having “names [empty of] affection [that] point up the pre-senility and vacuity of their characters,” Mommy and Daddy are cruel, boring people (143). Like Grandma, they are modeled after Albee’s parents Frances and Reed. Mommy, resembling Albee’s descriptions of Frances, tries to orchestrate her mother’s death. Daddy, who is submissive to Mommy for the entire play aside from the occasional selfish whine, captures Reed’s nonpresence in Albee’s life. Neither Mommy nor Daddy is given much depth. Even their dialogue reveals nothing further about their personalities. As they sit down and wait for Grandma to die, Daddy tries to start a conversation, which ends quickly when both he and Mommy recognize they have nothing to talk about. This inability to communicate, a common thread in Albee’s plays, shows how hollow people can be when they are content to accept the role society has

Edward Albee

offered them. Their complacency prevents the couple from hearing anything that Grandma says save indecipherable outbursts that sound like “a cross between a baby’s laugh and cry” (147). If regarded in terms of each character’s breaking of dramatic convention, this hollowness also prevents Mommy from controlling the scene according to her desires as Grandma does. Though the death ceremony continues onstage according to Grandma’s directions, Mommy can only hear offstage events and follow the script of a “grieving daughter.” Her lack of depth and myopic vision are clear as she repeatedly speaks “over” the audience when addressing it (148–149). As Grandma announces to the audience, the couple do not respect her. She describes how Mommy and Daddy were “decent” enough to make a place for her under the stove in their large townhouse. Mommy and Daddy treat Grandma sadistically. As they would a troublesome pet, they put her in a pen and ignore her. Mommy and Daddy’s cruelty and inability to communicate fully have the same source: They live exclusively in the illusion created by their social expectations. Going through the motions of taking care of Grandma and eventually laying her to rest, neither of them is capable of caring except when it is necessary for them to maintain a facade. Mommy’s fit of tears at the fi rst “offstage rumble” is a prime example of this type of ignorance: Mommy knows her cue to start mourning, whispering through her new-found tears, “It means the time has come for poor Grandma . . . and I can’t bear it!” (153–154). As soon as daylight officially marks the end of their “long night” of mourning, Mommy and Daddy take a brief look at Grandma’s corpse, convince themselves that she is happy, and then go about their business. The Sandbox is, along with The American Dream, A Delicate Balance, and Three Tall Women, one of Albee’s most autobiographical plays. Even after the meteoric success of the three-hour Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee maintained in interviews that The Sandbox was his best work. Indebted to absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, The Sandbox conveys the para-

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doxical nature of the human condition. Critical of American culture’s lack of authentic engagement and the treatment of the elderly, Albee presents a poignant depiction of a woman who is able to see through illusions but unable to change her fate.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In The American Dream, the Young Man is actually Mommy and Daddy’s son. How does this reflect on the interactions and similarities between the couple and the no-name pretty boy in The Sandbox? 2. George, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, takes the play to a close by dispelling illusions. He does this by symbolically killing and burying an imaginary son. Though Mommy and Daddy perform a similar ritual in The Sandbox, the insensitivity they demonstrate in the ceremony remains intact. Compare these death rituals and their respective consequences. 3. In the process of dying, Grandma seems to be the liveliest character in the play. What does Albee convey to the audience through her portrayal? 4. Explore the significance of the surreal elements in the play. As noted, the unrealistic quality of these elements distances the play from the everyday, but why does Albee, for instance, specifically choose a beach setting? Or a sandbox as a deathbed? 5. By having characters break established dramatic convention, Albee involves his audience in the action of the play. Discuss how this affects The Sandbox’s deviation from realism and its social commentary.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) Consisting of three acts spanning more than three hours, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was Albee’s fi rst attempt at a full-length play and drew much attention during its long run on Broadway. Though widely recognized as a pivotal work in American drama, Woolf has polarized critics since its debut, often provoking charges of nihilism and

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immorality due to the play’s ambiguous ending, its profanity, its disturbing depiction of a perverse marriage characterized by vicious psychological attacks, and its scathing critique of American culture. Despite or rather because of these aspects, Woolf is one of Albee’s most highly regarded works and defi ned the rest of his career. Albee originally intended to call the play The Exorcism. But he recalled seeing “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled on a mirror behind a bar in Greenwich Village and changed the title while working on a draft. Seemingly random, the title, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, is somewhat misleading: Virginia Woolf, a famous British modernist known for her innovative and groundbreaking novels, appears to have little to do with the play itself. This superficial disparity is not insurmountable: The characters in the play cope as illusion and reality are blurred and then unraveled, a characteristic shared by much of Virginia Woolf’s fiction. This unraveling, painful and traumatic, forces the characters as well as the audience to question what they believe to be true. Set in the fictional town of New Carthage, the play begins as George and Martha return home at two in the morning from a dinner party at the house of Martha’s father. George is a history professor at the college that his father-in-law oversees. George does not know that Martha has invited Nick, a handsome new biology professor, and his wife, Honey, over for a cocktail. George and Martha exchange insults over a drink before the guests’ arrival and, after very brief pleasantries, drag Nick and Honey into the verbal brawl as well. Massive amounts of alcohol are consumed during the “fun and games” that follow. To use George’s metaphor, by the end of act 2 each character has been peeled to the bone. Profane, witty, and merciless, these exchanges get out of hand; Martha and Nick commit adultery. The melee ends in act 3 as George announces that the son he and Martha have referred to throughout the night has been killed in an automobile accident. George’s announcement is intended to reveal that their son does not exist; he is a fiction they have both created as a sort

of comforting “bean bag” (Albee 98). Nick and Honey then exit, leaving George and Martha to go upstairs together at dawn, unsure about the future. The question “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” repeated throughout the play in recitations of a nursery rhyme is fi nally answered by Martha: “I . . . am . . . George . . . I . . . am.” (Albee 242). Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? primarily examines the relationship between George and Martha. The play centers on their failure to communicate and often-sadistic attempts to get through to one another. George is a run-down history professor who never made a “splash” at the college; Martha resents him for not being the protégé her aging father needs to continue his legacy. George’s professional failure, according to Martha, is due to a lack of “guts,” leading her to such statements as “if you existed I’d divorce you” (Albee 16). Six years George’s senior, Martha is a braying alcoholic who has lived under the shadow of her father for most of her life. Desperately wanting a child, Martha frequently mentions her “son” in an attempt to cope with her inability to have one. Conversely, Nick and Honey initially possess many of the wholesome and desirable qualities that George and Martha lack. A fit and youthful biology professor specializing in genetics, Nick is ambitious and epitomizes the qualities Martha looks for in George. Honey is similarly imbued with qualities that Martha lacks, seemingly supportive and nonconfrontational. The superficial well-being of the younger couple is demolished during the course of the evening. We learn at the beginning of act 2 that Nick was forced to marry Honey by a false pregnancy and was partially motivated to do so by her large inheritance. Nick’s depravity is fully realized when he has sex with Martha at the end of act 2 in order to secure his advancement at the college. Honey, an innocent victim for most of the play, is revealed to have been using birth control without Nick’s knowledge because she is afraid of the pain accompanying childbirth. All of these intimate details are made known during the four “games” that transpire: “Humiliate the Host,” “Get the Guests,” “Hump the Host-

Edward Albee

ess,” and “Bringing Up Baby” (Albee 140, 214). Motivated primarily by vindictiveness and revenge, the games strip the illusory façade each character hides behind. George explicitly describes this process of revealing in visceral terms during the third act: the games are like the act of peeling labels off a bottle, except the games peel off layers of skin and muscle to reveal bone and, fi nally, marrow (Albee 212–213). With the exception of “Hump the Hostess,” the games in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? strip away the characters’ disguises by blurring the boundary between reality and illusion. “Humiliate the Host,” for instance, takes a chain of events and moves it back and forth across this boundary. When they are left alone, George tells Nick a purportedly true story about a college chum who accidentally kills both of his parents. Later on, Martha reveals it is the plot of George’s novel. After a pause, Martha says that the novel was autobiographical. The story moves from being real, to being fiction, and back again. George’s response, “Get the Guests,” involves the same sort of transformation: After hearing Nick’s disclosure of the circumstances surrounding his marriage to Honey, George provides the group with a summary of his second novel. The summary is exactly what Nick confided to George earlier. Again, reality and fiction meld. The revealing function of these vicious interactions is hinted at in Albee’s title for the second act. Walpurgisnacht is a term from German folklore originally denoting a ritual congregation of witches that took place on May Day Eve. During these rites pagan gods were summoned and celebrated. After Christianity spread to Germany, the holiday represented a purging of evil spirits, coinciding with spring’s fi nal victory over winter. Similarly, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a ritual where psychological demons are unearthed. The ritualistic aspect of the play is most clearly seen in the fi nal game “Bringing Up Baby,” where George and Martha narrate the details of their imaginary son’s childhood while George recites a Roman Catholic burial chant in Latin from the Requiem Mass. Their fabricated story leads to a

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vicious argument over who is to blame for their son’s absence and leads to a sustained fi nale: Speaking together, George recites the requiem as Martha proclaims that the only hope she has had in the “darkness” of their marriage is their son. George then “exorcises” him, announcing that a telegram has come reporting his death. Finally at the “marrow,” Albee leaves George and Martha with nothing: What has been revealed at their core turns out to be an illusion. All that remains after the exorcism are mutual fear and doubt. Furthermore, everything preceding the exorcism is called into question since the distinction between illusion and reality in the play has been blurred so thoroughly. The fact that George makes his son die under circumstances similar to events in his autobiography underscores this. Albee, however, does seem to hint that George and Martha will go on to construct another illusion in place of their dead “son.” But, as Martha’s ambivalent responses to George indicate, Albee leaves the ending of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ambiguous, open to interpretation. The demons exorcised during this ritual are not solely autobiographical. Albee implies that certain characters—George and Nick particularly— represent general aspects of history, culture, and philosophical thought. Albee has admitted that he named George and Martha after George and Martha Washington, the fi rst president and fi rst lady of the United States. Nick, on the other hand, was named after the cold war–era Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Premiering during the same month as the Cuban missile crisis, Albee’s play contains political allusions that are impossible to miss. Nick’s namesake held the fate of the world in his hands just as the United States threatened military action against Cuba for having Soviet-manned nuclear missile batteries on its territory, an event that marked the height of cold war hostilities. This political allusion is strengthened by George’s argument against what he perceives to be the threat Nick and his scientific colleagues represent to humanity. Once it is established that Nick conducts genetics research, George levels the

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accusation: “You people are rearranging my genes, so that everyone will be like everyone else” (Albee 37). He goes further, portraying Nick as an example of a new generation of scientists who will alter the human race, eradicating unwanted genetic traits, and, according to George, destroying individuality and ethnic diversity in the process. The emergence of this “race of glorious men” made in Nick’s image will produce an end to the arts as well as the chaotic “sea-changing rhythm of . . . history” (Albee 66–67). The notion that history can be made sense of through scientific reasoning, the systematic censorship of art, and the privileging of state concerns over individual rights are just a few issues common to both George’s rants against Nick and prevalent criticisms of Sovietstyle communism. Putting Nick’s namesake aside, these hyperbolic accusations redefi ne George and Nick’s characters in other important ways. Young and ambitious, Nick embodies the future, with the scientific drive to fi nd and make order. Older and jaded by past failures, George embodies history and the recognition of its disorderliness. With these perspectives Albee presents two differing aspects or views of civilization: one sees (perhaps naively) inevitable progress; the other remains skeptical of prolonged success. This is most forcefully hinted at in act 2 when George recites a passage from a similarly themed philosophical text he has been reading, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918) (Albee 174). The historical and philosophical allusions, though only hinted at and therefore incomplete, add significance to other elements in the play. By making George and Martha (the fi rst couple) childless, Albee comments on the notion that there is a trouble-free existence awaiting those who blindingly conform to the American dream. This allegory is particularly sophisticated because it captures a sense of the complacency and ignorance that develop from holding ideals that are impossible to attain. Until “The Exorcism” Albee’s couple propagates a lie that does not satisfy their needs because they are afraid to start over, to admit

that there is nothing in their relationship but themselves. The lie causes strife and selfi sh confl ict until it is fi nally purged, revealing George and Martha alone, fi nally communicating with one other and fearing what the future will entail. Albee suggests that American culture needs a similar purging, a reassessment during which illusions passing for truth can be reevaluated. In the process of this expurgation, a common humanity might be more clearly recognized.

For Discussion or Writing 1. When the curtains close, the end that George precipitates calls everything in the world of the play into question. After numerous illusions are shed, George reveals that what is left—the “marrow”—is in fact fictitious. This, in effect, turns the play into an illusion fi lled with illusions. How does this change the role of an audience? Does it place the audience closer to the characters (who are themselves an audience of sorts), or does it do something else? Justify your answer. 2. Martha’s character defies many of the prescribed gender roles prevalent in 1962. Though many of her traits would still be considered deplorable, especially her alcoholism and infidelity, in what ways does her character anticipate changes in contemporary gender roles? In what ways does Martha seem trapped in traditional ideas of womanhood? 3. Should George view Nick and his fellow scientists as enemies? The dangers of technology and how it might be misused continue to be debated, especially with regard to genetic research. Does Who’s Afraid of Woolf? have anything to offer to these debates? If so, what? Explain. 4. In Albee’s The Zoo Story (1959) Jerry speaks of “the teaching emotion.” This emotion is the product of both love and hatred. Jerry tries to evoke this emotion in Peter so that they can really communicate. There are many instances in Woolf where characters speak about communication. How does the “teaching emotion” fit into the play’s characters’ interactions? Does Peter

Edward Albee

and Jerry’s predicament in Zoo also characterize the way the of Woolf characters relate? Explain.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ALBEE AND HIS WORK 1. The American dream is the concept widely held in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve prosperity. These values inspired the original pioneers who crossed the American Plains when Europeans fi rst immigrated to America; many Americans share these same values today. First, read Albee’s The American Dream. With Albee’s plays in mind, evaluate the portrait of the American dream Albee paints. Is he accurate in his assessment? Why or why not? 2. The contemporary playwright David Mamet argues, “Plays are better read than performed.” With Mamet’s comments in mind, think about the difference between reading and performing Albee’s plays. Which do you think would be more meaningful and why? Is Mamet right about plays by Albee? What about other plays you have read? Are the works of Shakespeare better read or performed? Compare your reactions to reading and performing other plays with the way you feel about reading and performing Albee’s works. 3. Is reading Albee’s plays an enjoyable experience for you? Why or why not? What makes it difficult to read Albee’s plays; what barriers make imagining his plays difficult? Why do you think Albee utilizes the techniques he does? 4. Read a Beckett play such as Waiting for Godot or a Sartre play such as No Exit. Then, compare the play(s) with Albee’s works. Does Albee share a similar sensibility? Why or why not? Would you classify these playwrights together? What comparisons can be made? What differences can be found? 5. Nihilism is the general rejection of established social conventions and beliefs, especially of morality and religion. It is the belief that life is

11

pointless, that human values are worthless, and that there is no objective basis for truth. With this in mind, are Albee’s plays nihilistic? Why or why not? Give examples to support what you say. 6. Write an essay in which you analyze the following works: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Edward Albee’s The American Dream. What portrait of America do the three authors paint? How can their works be compared? How do the three works comment on American society? 7. Many argue that Albee’s works are “postmodern.” Consult an encyclopedia or trustworthy Web site to learn about postmodernism, such as . After learning the basic hallmarks of postmodernism, write an essay on postmodern elements in Albee’s plays. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Albee, Edward. Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays 1960 to 2005. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. ———. The Collected Plays of Edward Albee. Vol. 1–3. New York: Overlook Press, 2003–2006. Amacher, Richard E. Edward Albee. New York: Twayne, 1969. Bennett, Robert B. “Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story.” Modern Drama 20, 1 (March 1977): 55–66. Bigsby, C. W. E. Albee. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969. ———. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Vol. 2: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 249–329. ———, ed. Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975. Bloom, Harold, ed. Edward Albee. New York: Chelsea, 1987. Bottoms, Stephen. Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to Modern Drama. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. Cohn, Ruby. Edward Albee. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Davis, J. Madison, and Philip C. Kolin, eds. Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Debusscher, Gilbert. Edward Albee: Tradition and Renewal. Brussels: Center for American Studies, 1969. Debusscher, Gilbert et al., eds. News Essays on American Drama. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989. De La Fuente, Patricia et al., eds. Edward Albee: Planted Wilderness: Interview, Essays, and Bibliography. Edinburgh, Tex.: Pan American University, 1980. “Edward Albee News—The New York Times.” New York Times. 27 June 2006. Available online. URL: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/ timestopics/people/a/edward_albee/index.html. Accessed March 25, 2009. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961, 225–227 Giantvalley, Scott. Edward Albee: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Gussow, Mel. Edward Albee: A Singular Journey: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Hayman, Ronald. Edward Albee. New York: Ungar, 1973. Hirsch. Foster. Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee? Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts, 1978. Jenckes, Norma, ed. American Drama 2, no. 2 (Spring 1993). Special edition of journal dedicated to essays on Albee. Kolin, Philip, and C. J. Madison Davis, ed. Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Boston: Hall, 1986. Luere, Jeane. “Terror and Violence in Edward Albee? From Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Marriage Play.” South Central Review 7, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 50–58. Mann, Bruce J, ed. Edward Albee: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2003.

McCarthy, Gerry. Edward Albee. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Nilan, Mary M. “Albee’s The Zoo Story: Alienated Man and the Nature of Love.” Modern Drama 16 (1973): 55–59. Paolucci, Anne. From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. Post, Robert M. “Salvation or Damnation? Death in the Plays of Edward Albee.” American Drama 2, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 32–49. Roudané, Matthew C. “Communication as Therapy in the Theater of Edward Albee.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 6, nos. 3/4 (August 1985): 302–314. ———. Understanding Edward Albee. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. ———. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Necessary Fictions, Terrifying Realities. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Rutenberg, Michael E. Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest. New York: Avon Books, 1970. Sarotte, Georges-Michel. “Edward Albee: Homosexual Playwright in Spite of Himself.” In Like a Brother, Like a Lover: Male Homosexuality in the American Novel and Theater from Herman Melville to James Baldwin. Translated by Richard Miller. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Solomon, Rakesh H. “Crafting Script into Performance: Edward Albee in Rehearsal.” American Drama 2, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 76–99. ———. “Text, Subtext, and Performance: Edward Albee on Directing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Theatre Survey 34, no. 2 (November 1993): 95–110. Stenz, Anita Marie. Edward Albee: The Poet of Loss. New York: Mouton, 1978. Vos, Nelvin. Eugene Ionesco and Edward Albee: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1968. Wallace, Robert S. “The Zoo Story: Albee’s Attack on Fiction.” Modern Drama 16 (1973): 49–54. Wasserman, Julian N. et al., eds. Edward Albee: An Interview and Essays. Houston: University of St. Thomas, 1983.

John Becker

James Baldwin (1924–1987) For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness. (“Sonny’s Blues”)

J

Luckily his mother was not his only support. Early on Baldwin attracted the attention and help of people who responded to his gifts by helping him develop and increase them. He found his first help of this kind in Harlem’s Public School 24, where the principal, Gertrude Ayer (the first black principal of the New York school system) noted his academic talent and encouraged Orilla Miller (Bill was her nickname), a young white woman assigned through work with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to assist in this school, to give him special attention and help. His father was resistant, but, according to Baldwin, because she was white, his father found it difficult to forbid his son the opportunities she provided, such as attending plays and movies, among other “worldly enrichments.” She also assisted the family, in the midst of the depression, through at least one very difficult winter. Baldwin credits this relationship with Bill Miller for preventing him from ever truly hating and condemning the white race. Bill’s interaction with him and his family was an antidote to the harshness of his daily encounters in Harlem with whites such as the police. His second set of mentor-teachers discovered him in their midst at Frederick Douglass Junior High School: Countee Cullen (a poet famous in his own right during the Harlem Renaissance) and Herman Porter (perhaps less famous but no less influential for the young Baldwin). Cullen was the adviser of

ames Baldwin was born in Harlem, August 2, 1924, the son of Emma Berdis Jones and a father whose name he never knew. David Baldwin, a figure who looms large in Baldwin’s life and work, adopted him three years later. This powerful figure was the source of the central conflict in Baldwin’s life; Baldwin felt that he withheld his approval and love, thus fueling Baldwin’s lifelong quest for approval. In one of his most famous essays, “Notes of a Native Son,” he begins to gain a compassionate understanding of the difficulties of his father’s life and of the lessons for Baldwin, as an adult, from that life. Furthermore, their relationship becomes a metaphor for his relationship with his home country, “America, the Land of the Free.” Throughout his work, especially the early work, Baldwin insists on two things he learned in those relationships: that truth—difficult, heartbreaking truth—and love, difficult and heartbreaking, must be embraced at whatever cost. Baldwin learned additional lessons about love and constancy in his home. He had eight younger half brothers and sisters, for whom he helped his mother care. In several accounts of his life, his mother is quoted as describing him with “a book in one hand and the latest baby in the other.” His mother constantly supported him in his pursuit of learning about life beyond their narrow world, while his father (he always referred to David Baldwin as his father rather than his stepfather) disapproved of his involvement in books, movies, and “worldly” activities in general.

13

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Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

the Douglass Literary Club and Porter of the school magazine, which Baldwin contributed to and edited. Cullen commented on his writing, and Porter, among other things, claimed credit for introducing Baldwin to the 42nd Street library, thus enlarging his reading sphere (also over his father’s objections). By this age, Baldwin’s passion for reading and writing began to blossom. Among his favorite books were Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which he later astutely critiqued in one of his famous essays about the inherent weaknesses of protest literature. He is said to have read these two, in particular, repeatedly. He also began to read the works of Henry James and other notable literary talents during this time, all of which later provided both models and inspiration for his own work. But it was while he was editing and writing for the DeWitt High School magazine, The Magpie, that one of his peers introduced him to a man who confirmed and validated his dedication to the arts—Beauford Delaney, an African-American painter living at that time in Greenwich Village. He credits Delaney with teaching him how to see. They remained lifelong friends, meeting again in Paris several years later. Perhaps Baldwin’s most famous mentor, however, was Richard Wright, whom he met in the early 1940s (sources cite both 1943 and 1944 as the year they met). Wright’s recommendation secured Baldwin a Eugene Saxton Memorial Trust Award in 1945. Baldwin essentially followed Wright to Paris, where both writers joined a colony of African-American writers and artists. The expatriate community in Paris in those days included an international group of writers and artists. But African-American artists and musicians felt even more strongly that Paris provided them with greater freedom to pursue their arts than the United States. Once there, however, the two writers had a major parting of the ways; Baldwin published two essays in which he severely criticized Wright’s Native Son (“Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone”). Before this breach, while still in the United States, Wright’s influence, among other factors, helped him get his fi rst reviews as a critic published in the Nation, the New Leader and Commentary. In 1947–48 Baldwin published 17

reviews and essays in these journals. In 1948, both his first essay (“The Harlem Ghetto”) and his first short story (“Previous Condition”) were published in Commentary. This work, plus the support of influential friends like Wright, helped him secure the Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948. He used the money to purchase his ticket to Paris, where he claims to have arrived with only $40 and a Bessie Smith record to begin his life as an expatriate. In 1953 with the publication of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, his literary career began to receive public and critical attention. For the next few years, Baldwin experimented with different genres— fiction, essays, and plays—and he continued to explore questions of identity from the vantage point of his French surroundings. Baldwin’s first stint as an expatriate ended, however, in 1957, when he returned to the United States. By that time, he had successfully published two novels and a collection of essays, so his work as a writer was established. In addition, during the time he had been mostly absent from the United States (except for a brief return around 1954 to participate in the staging of his play Amen Corner by Owen Dodson and the Howard Players), the Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum from the Montgomery bus boycott and the Supreme Court ruling ending segregation in the public schools. He had read and heard about these events and was drawn to learn more about this struggle. An editor proposed that he tour the South (his first venture there) and write a series of essays about his own observations. His participation in the movement began with this trip and continued throughout the remainder of his life. He met and worked with many leaders of the struggle, from M ARTIN LUTHER K ING, JR., and Medgar Evers to M ALCOLM X. His association with these figures, as well as the interviews he conducted with the young people integrating schools throughout the South and with the people he met and listened to behind closed doors as he traveled with Evers to investigate a murder of a black man fueled his work over the next decade. His response to what he saw and heard in those days is nowhere more vividly expressed than in his The Fire Next Time, a text that earned for him the labels “prophet” and “witness.” During this period

James Baldwin 15

(until about the end of the 1970s), Baldwin divided his time among many places, but he was in the States as much as he was out of them. He contributed to the civil rights movement by his presence as well as by extensive lecturing in an effort to raise money for the struggle. This activity in addition to his essays and continued writing (he produced another novel and two additional essay collections as well as another play—Blues for Mr. Charlie specifically in response to the Emmett Till murder) made this the period of his greatest fame. Yet Baldwin’s search for truth and identity did not end with coming to terms with his identity as an African American. Early in his stay in Paris, he noted the differences in outlook and experience of the Africans he met. He continued to ponder these differences during his many travels from continent to continent, including his first trip to Africa in 1962. Baldwin used his travels, especially his times out of the United States, as times to complete more work and as refuges for rethinking his observations and concerns about life and race relations. Even in Africa, his thoughts seemed to focus on what he was learning and beginning to understand his American identity more deeply. Baldwin’s career can be roughly divided into three parts—his early works (the late 1940s through late 1950s), the middle period (the 1960s and 1970s), and the late work (the 1980s). In the first part of his career, his exploration of identity focuses on the personal, trying to discover who he really is as a person and how that personal identity relates to anything larger. This is especially captured in the title essay of his first collection, “Notes of a Native Son.” The second phase of his work encompasses the political upheaval of the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath in the black revolutionary movement. By this time, Baldwin was an established writer, adding his voice eloquently to those calling for the end of segregation and for full equality. His work during this period has a decidedly more political edge but continues to be rooted in his actual, lived experience and the contemplation of that experience. His work from this period often focuses on the experiences of other African Americans he interviewed, observed, and lived among during that time. This work also reveals

a growing disillusionment with the idea that America will change its ways. Works like The Fire Next Time represent this phase. But by the third and last part of his career, he focused on young people and on necessary social change. Works like his novel If Beale Street Could Talk, with its two young protagonists, articulate his concerns for the future. Baldwin’s place in the literary pantheon was captured in the massive funeral held for him at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1987. Many celebrities, writers, artists, politicians, and dignitaries participated, including a representative of the French government, which had awarded him the Legion of Honor in 1986. Notably, the United States conferred no similar honor on its native son; nor was there a representative of the American publishing industry in the proceedings. Yet writers as diverse as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Amiri Baraka paid tribute to him at his funeral, acknowledging the powerful witness of his words, both spoken and written, throughout his life. For a time, Baldwin’s works were overpowered as the subject of critical study as African-American literary artists and the accompanying scholars produced a wave of work. But somewhere toward the end of the 1990s, critical interest in Baldwin’s work began gaining momentum, assisted by the interest in both queer studies and in cultural studies. Intersectionality became a popular term in critical circles. An approach to sociology, cultural studies, and other social sciences connected with activism and social work, intersectionality describes how differences based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, and class act together. Almost all of Baldwin’s work examines the connections among identities: African American, gay, American, expatriate, artist, political activist, and critic. His work is being reexamined through the lens of cross-culturalism or transnationality. This critical study is providing new and interesting ways to consider his texts as well as his life. Baldwin left a rich body of work, including six novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Just above My Head) and a short story collection (Going to Meet the Man). He also published four essay collections (Notes

16 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street), two long essays (The Devil Finds Work and The Evidence of Things Not Seen), two plays (Blues for Mr. Charlie, The Amen Corner). His work also includes a children’s book (Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood) and two book-length conversations (A Rap on Race with Margaret Mead and A Dialogue with Nikki Giovanni) plus additional texts, 22 titles altogether. Much of what James Baldwin writes is rooted in the autobiographical, which then becomes the occasion for meditation on broader issues. He focuses on discovering identity, on the nature and effects of racism for both the oppressor and the oppressed, on the necessity of facing our collective past as Americans and as individuals, and the power of love. He called himself a “witness” and was hailed by others as a prophet in the Old Testament tradition, calling us to acknowledge our individual and collective sins against each other, especially in the arena of race, and warning us of impending destruction should we fail to heed the call and change our ways. David Leeming, one of Baldwin’s biographers, writing about Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, identifies common themes throughout Baldwin’s work: “the search for identity in a world that because of its racial myths cannot recognize reality; the acceptance of one’s inheritance (‘the conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American’) as one claims one’s birthright (‘my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever,’ the loneliness of the artist’s quest, the urgent necessity of love” (100).

Go Tell It on The Mountain (1953) Alfred Knopf published James Baldwin’s fi rst novel in 1953. It is one of Baldwin’s best known and highest praised works, closely patterned after his own life. Set primarily in two Harlem locations—the crowded tenement apartment John shares with his family and storefront church of which they are members—this is 14-year-old John Grimes’s coming of age story. The novel begins as John awakens on the morning of his 14th birthday and continues to the following morning. In the ensuing time, John has several important

insights, culminating in his salvation on the “threshing floor” and ending in the ambiguous promise of new horizons for him. The key characters are John; his father, Gabriel; and his mother, Elizabeth. Other significant figures include his brother, Roy; his aunt, Florence (his father’s sister); and the “saints” of the church, including Elisha. The story of John and Gabriel locked in conflict frames and shapes the story. Gabriel is complex, a selfrighteous man who has answered a call to the ministry. When we meet him, his preaching days are nearly over (he seems unable to avoid alienating everyone with whom he has contact), but he is a formidable elder in this small congregation. His favorite text is “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” For Gabriel this involves adhering strictly to a fundamentalist view of Christianity that forbids all worldly pleasures (such as going to movies) and limits contact with the world. With the additional restrictions imposed on life by poverty and racism, John and his whole family live in a narrow world from which he rebels, as his brother Roy does. In the course of the novel, we discover that Gabriel married Elizabeth, whose son, John, had been born out of wedlock. John, however, does not know this, yet he is aware of the difference in the ways Gabriel treats him and his younger brother and sister (both Gabriel’s biological children). Although Gabriel initially agreed to raise John as his own (and he does provide for him and labors to raise him well by his lights), he cannot seem to escape his sense of John’s having been born in sin. Because of Gabriel’s attitude toward him, John’s life is complicated by the struggle for his father’s attention and approval, both unavailable to him. John fi nds some relief, however, through his school life and his imaginative life (stirred by the books and movies his father would forbid him) and in the company of friends like Elisha, his slightly older role model at church. But such relief is not enough. As the story unfolds and the pressures of his life continue to build, we become aware that John is facing a crisis. Entering puberty causes him to be acutely aware of his body, and at the same time he becomes just as acutely aware of the constraints of his poverty and race on him and

James Baldwin 17

his fellow Harlemites. He sees the boys and girls he has grown up with changing in front of him, menaced by the street life that surrounds them. He hears the urgent warnings of the saints about the perils and pitfalls of worldly life, and he is afraid—fi lled with a sense of dread and a conviction of his sinfulness. These pressures and the growing animosity between him and his father catapult John into the emotionally charged atmosphere in the church on the evening of his birthday. He is seeking safety and relief and being urged toward salvation by the joint efforts of all the saints. In response to the complex emotions at war both inside and outside him, he finds himself on the “threshing floor,” literally fighting for his life (and soul, according to the saints). When he rises, we are led to believe he has achieved a new position, but the story ends a bit ominously as he faces his unsmiling father, announcing, “I’m ready. . . . I’m coming. I’m on my way.” This is not simply a story of one young man’s salvation, but a complex narrative providing insight into the way the past shapes the present. Baldwin accomplishes some of this through the stories of Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth. They, too, were young people enmeshed in a variety of circumstances from which they struggled to extricate themselves. In the present, they each continue to wrestle with private longings and contradictions as well as their inability to express the longings of their hearts clearly. Their inarticulateness also grows out of a fear of facing their demons. One of Baldwin’s concerns, one that he returns to several times, is the grief characters bring on themselves, but most unforgivably on those they love, when they willingly deceive themselves. This “willed innocence” he describes as a great sin, exploring its ramifications more deeply in his second novel, Giovanni’s Room. Go Tell It on the Mountain also comments on religion, especially the highly emotional brand of fundamental Christianity portrayed through this storefront church. He implies some hypocrisy here and a good deal of fear. In a scene where young Elisha and Ella Mae are called out in front of the church family for their innocent attentions to each other, it seems clear that this way of worshipping driven by fear precludes normal interaction. Both

young people have had spotless reputations to that point and seem simply to enjoy each other’s company. However, afterward, Ella seems hurt and distanced from the group. Baldwin also captures the enormous pressure the saints exert on John to be saved. They almost force him, it seems, to clutch at this “salvation” to save himself from the normal confusions and rites of passage of adolescence. But several questions remain: What is John being saved from? What is he really submitting to? What type of salvation is this anyway?

For Discussion or Writing 1. The final scene of the novel, on the threshing floor, is a long and complex one. Reread it carefully and identify the stages through which John progresses. How does Baldwin “mark” each stage? How does he indicate the onset of the next stage? Can you identify a “focus” for each of these stages? 2. Florence, Elizabeth, and Gabriel all have their own chapter conveying their individual stories. What patterns can you identify among them? How does a comparison of their circumstances provide a deeper insight into John’s story? Explain each response. 3. One way that Baldwin has of making the central conflict clearer is by mirroring it in several smaller scenes. For example, Gabriel’s lover and the birth of his unacknowledged son, Royal, mirror Elizabeth’s pregnancy and John’s illegitimacy. In an ironic way, the legitimate status of Deborah (Gabriel’s first wife) and her barrenness also mirror and comment on this whole issue. Locate other major concerns or issues presented in the novel that are clarified by these mirrored segments. 4. The novel is divided into three parts. Each part begins with a quote and in part 2, “The Prayers of the Saints,” each saint’s prayer begins with a different quote. Select one of these quotes: (a) Explain what you think the quote means. What questions does the quote raise? What ideas about the story does the quote suggest? Use what you know about how the story ends.

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5.

6.

7.

8.

(b) Reread the section introduced by that quote. After rereading it, compare your expectations to what you found. How has focusing on the quote affected your rereading? The book uses references to traditional Christianity throughout. John, Gabriel, Elizabeth, Esther, Elisha, and Deborah are all biblical characters. Choose any one of them, and research their biblical counterpart. For example, Deborah is mentioned in the Old Testament. What is her story there? How does her biblical story compare with the Deborah character in the novel? What does it help you understand the points Baldwin seems to be making? Why or why not? Go Tell It on the Mountain belongs to a literary tradition called “the coming of age” story, or Bildungsroman, a novel that chronicles its protagonist’s development, his or her “education” in the world. What other stories, movies, and plays can you think of that have young characters coming of age, typically young teenagers moving toward adulthood? Identify two other stories like this (e.g., Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Patersen or Star Wars, either episodes 4–6 or 1–3). What are the main issues with which each character struggles? Are those struggles completely resolved by the end of the story? If so, how? Can you figure out a pattern of such stories? How does thinking about this type of story help you understand the novel? John goes through a crisis at the end of the novel, but in part 2, Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth all experience crises as well. How does each meet that individual crisis? What does the nature of each crisis as well as the way in which each character handles his or her crisis reveal about that character? The big question at the end of the novel is “How real is John’s salvation?” Divide into teams to defend one of the following: “John is truly ‘saved’ in both the spiritual and the psychological way.” Or “John’s ‘salvation’ is not real. It is another desperate act that will deepen the conflicts he is already facing.” Remember to use the text as evidence.

Notes of a Native Son (1955) “One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” In this quotation, from the “Autobiographical Notes” in Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin describes the inspiration for all his work, both fiction and nonfiction. His essays often had a greater impact and, in general, garnered higher praise than most of his other work, with the exception of his first two novels. What continues to attract readers to these essays is Baldwin’s willingness to probe his own life so deeply, examining the darkest corners, but not in a confessional way. He examines his life experiences and his responses to them for the lessons they can teach him and for the ways they can illuminate his connection to the world. In 1955 Beacon Press published this collection, but many of the essays in it had been published earlier. The collection comprises the following works, in the order in which they appear in the text, with their original dates of publication in parentheses: PART 1 “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) “Many Thousands Gone” (1951) “Carmen Jones: The Dark Is Light Enough” (1955) PART 2 “The Harlem Ghetto” (1948) “Journey to Atlanta” (1948) “Notes of a Native Son” (1955) PART 3 “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (1950) “A Question of Identity” (1954) “Equal in Paris” (1955) “Stranger in the Village” (1953) Baldwin’s biographer and critic David Leeming comments on the collection’s form and themes: “Notes of a Native Son is divided into three parts. The first is concerned with the identity of the ‘Negro’ and

James Baldwin 19

with the African American as artist. The second contains three essays on black life in America, culminating in the great autobiographical essay ‘Notes of a Native Son,’ which is the record of a painful search for self as well as for ethnic identity. The last part is made up of four essays written to America from the expatriate in Europe” (102). The two essays that open the book, “Everybody’s Protest Novel” and “Many Thousands Gone,” helped establish Baldwin’s reputation early in his career; he uses them to analyze and critique the work of the literary giant Richard Wright. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” he examines the limits of that form for artistic expression, looking specifically at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and at Wright’s Native Son. Both novels had been considered “cutting edge” and were very popular in their day for almost the same reasons. Each directly addresses the primary racial problem of the particular time in which it appeared—Stowe’s protest against slavery, Wright’s protest against the economic, social, and political oppression of blacks by law and by custom. Each aims primarily at white audiences and presents an argument against these practices by dramatically rendering the extreme negative effects they can have. Baldwin takes them to task, however, for allowing their “mission” to cloud their artistic vision. He calls into question the characters presented in each text, accusing the writers of ignoring the complexities of real people in their eagerness to communicate ideas. He also particularly reviews Wright’s presentation of relations between the liberal whites of his book (as represented by Jan) and the novel’s protagonist. The acuteness of Baldwin’s critique is reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s examination of race represented in fiction in her demanding text Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Unfortunately for Baldwin, Wright, who had done so much to help him just a few years before, read these essays as a personal attack. He is reported never to have forgiven Baldwin, giving rise to the accusation that Baldwin’s pattern was to seek a father/mentor figure, then, as he progressed, attack that figure publicly. To a lesser extent this happened with Langston Hughes as well, although Hughes seems to have taken it better, even returning volleys to some of

Baldwin’s later works. Still, Baldwin is establishing his direct gaze and address of painful, difficult topics in these essays. Another important essay in this collection is “Stranger in the Village,” in which Baldwin examines his experience as the only black man in a Swiss village to which he has gone as a refuge in which to write. A friend’s family has given him the use of a chateau; he arrives there the fi rst time as a guest and returns alone the second time. It is a small village, and the villagers, while not exactly hostile, make Baldwin aware of his “otherness.” This provides him an opportunity—distance, time, space—to think again about the meaning of race, particularly of the divisions—social, historical, and psychological—between whites and blacks. One of the villagers assures him that they have a custom in which every year several of the village children dress up as blacks (using black face makeup and straw or other materials to create “wigs”) and collect money from the villagers to “buy” Africans. The idea is to provide money for missionaries striving to save African souls. The villager imparts this information to Baldwin as an attempt to show that they are kindly disposed to him and “his people.” Naturally, it has a different effect, though Baldwin takes note of the kind intent. In his reflection on his experience as an outsider in this village, he develops the “stranger” motif as a metaphor for the experience of African Americans, at least, in Western culture. He ends his ruminations with the observation that, because of the involvement of European cultures with African cultures, it will no longer be possible for the West to think of itself as wholly white ever again, announcing another Baldwin theme that African Americans and whites are permanently and inextricably interconnected. But by far the most powerful and significant piece in this text is the title essay, “Notes of a Native Son,” a meditation on the nature of love and the price of fear and hatred. Baldwin wrote this essay as he reflected on his father’s death and the meaning of his father’s life and death in his own life: “When his life [Baldwin’s father’s] had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own” (“Notes of a Native Son”). Using the lens of his own life, he probes his father’s

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world, struggling with the meaning of their complicated and disheartening relationship. He uses this examination to explore the nature and complications of familial love—the importance of confronting and exorcising hate, the difficult necessity of forgiveness. Furthermore, he considers the price of trying to understand as well as the price of not understanding race relations in America. For race in America, Baldwin insists, deals with family relations—desperate, intimate family relations. Therein, he tells us, lie both the hope for working things out and the tragedy should we fail to do so.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart” (“Notes of a Native Son”). Examine this quote carefully. Discuss several ways the essay shows the truth of this analysis, both literally and figuratively. For example, what are some different ways one might interpret the phrase “my real life”? 2. Consider a situation in which you have been an outsider and very aware of your outsider status. Tell the story of that situation. Who was involved? What happened? How did you come to be in this situation? Why were you an outsider? Next analyze it. When and how did you become most aware of being an outsider? What were your feelings at that time? How did you react? What do you think about both the situation and your reaction to it now? Did you learn anything from this encounter or has anything about that encounter continued to affect your attitudes and/or behavior now? Explain. 3. Baldwin said that he read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin repeatedly as a child. It was a favorite of his. Yet in “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” he critiques it severely. Examine some book or movie from your own past that you have known well and loved that you feel much differently about today. Explain your change of opinion. 4. In these essays, Baldwin, as do many other essayists (E. B. White, Alice Walker, Anna Quindlen, Amy Tan, among others), chooses some specific

personal experience and uses that as a platform from which to contemplate or comment on some related but larger ideas in the world. Think about your own experiences. Which ones do you think of as “typical” (i.e., first date, fi rst day of school, fights with brothers or sisters)? Is there material here that you could use to examine in terms of what this experience could explain about the “way the world works” in 21st-century America? Consider the first day of school stories. How was yours the same as many others that you know? If it was your fi rst day of attending any school, were you nervous? Excited? About what? Was one or both of your parents with you? Why? Was there some effort to “prepare” you for the day? Was it treated as a special day? If so, why? When you think back on it, how does your experience help us think about how we as Americans value education, for instance? What do the details of your experience, especially as they overlap with or are “typical” of the experiences of others, reveal about American values? How might race, class, ethnicity, or gender differences affect both the experience itself and what that experience might reveal?

Giovanni’s Room (1956) James Baldwin uses aspects of his personal experience to probe, question, and meditate on meaning in his works. Most notably, he investigates the idea of romantic love in his second novel, Giovanni’s Room, published by Dial Press in 1956. A daring novel for the 1950s, Giovanni’s Room explores a homosexual relationship. All of the characters are white; Baldwin clearly wants to avoid what might have become a different story about race. Instead, he fashions a story about a young American man, David, unwilling to acknowledge his love for Giovanni, a beautiful young Italian man he meets in a Parisian bar, because he is unwilling to accept his attraction to males and the fact that he has fallen for Giovanni in particular. That internal confl ict becomes a meditation on integrity and the meaning of love, on what we value and what humanizes and dehumanizes us.

James Baldwin 21

Giovanni’s Room is told in two parts: The fi rst part is composed of three chapters; the second unfolds in five. As Go Tell It on the Mountain does, it begins on one day and concludes the following morning. But in between Baldwin employs flashback and other devices to tell the story. Set in France, most of the narrative actually occurs in Paris. The settings include the bar in which the two men fi rst meet and the room that becomes both a refuge and a kind of prison for David and Giovanni. Baldwin creates the sense of Parisian life as experienced at the bohemian fringe of the society—cafés, bars, and nightlife. Nobody in this novel appears to have a day job, because so much of the action revolves around a certain aspect of Paris nightlife. Yet within this exotic setting, Baldwin crafts a story about human relations, not exotic ones. Early in the novel, for example, David gets good advice from one of the other significant characters— Jacques—who exhorts him to pay attention to and embrace this love. Jacques cautions David that such love is rare and missing it or throwing it away will have lifelong consequences for him. But David tries both to avoid acknowledging the depth of his feeling for Giovanni and any commitment to him and to maintain the relationship. That basic dishonesty and cowardice end up destroying both men, as well as causing significant collateral damage. Two deaths are attributable, at least in part, to David’s behavior. His is the kind of “willed blindness” that Baldwin identified as the “unforgivable sin,” because it allows the innocent to cause great harm yet deny responsibility for that harm. Giovanni’s Room tells David’s story as he faces the willfulness and destructiveness of his “innocence.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Even now, homosexual love is a controversial topic. It was much more controversial when this novel was first published, so much so that Baldwin had a difficult time finding a publisher. Research the initial critical reception of the novel. What do you think critics would say about it now? Compare its treatment of romantic love between two men to that theme treated in recent fi lms such as Brokeback Mountain (2005).

2. In this novel, as in Go Tell It on the Mountain, the coming dawn signals more than just the literal new day. Examine the ironies of David’s situation in view of this dawn. What “new day” is this for David? What new way of life does it usher in for him? What “dark night” does it end? How does his emotional state match the expectations one might have at this point? 3. Look at the consequences of David’s “willed blindness.” Besides Giovanni, who suffers because of this sin? How? How might the story have been different had David been able to face the truth about himself? 4. Trudier Harris, a critic and scholar, has written a book about Baldwin’s women. Look at the women in this novel. Besides Hella, there are two or three additional female figures. Identify them. What do you note about these women and their placement in the text? How has Baldwin crafted their characters? How do they fare in comparison to other minor characters in the text? 5. Has Baldwin’s treatment of homosexuality contributed to or challenged stereotypes? Gather supporting details for your opinion from the specifics of the text. 6. David’s sins include what seems to be total selfishness. Everyone who has ever cared for him is sacrificed to his intense need to maintain a certain image of himself. In light of this, how do you read his final response to Giovanni’s situation? Is he a man finally moved to deep compassion and remorse, or has he simply become obsessed with his own guilt and so once again become totally self-absorbed? Use the text to support your view. 7. Money or the lack of it seems to drive much of the action of this book. In what ways can you imagine a different outcome had the economic realities of the story been different? (For example, what might have happened to the relationship if Giovanni had been independently wealthy?)

“Sonny’s Blues” (1957) First published in Partisan Review in the summer 1957 issue, “Sonny’s Blues” is a short story that

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expresses many of Baldwin’s recurrent themes. It is set in a “modern” Harlem, the ghetto Harlem of the 1950s and 1960s, rather than the Harlem of the earlier cultural explosion referred to as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. It is a story of two brothers. The one who narrates the tale is a high school math teacher, with a wife and children, who lives in a housing project that reveals his middle-class aspirations but that on further analysis is not very different from the ghetto in which he and his brother were raised. The other is Sonny, the quintessential artist/ musician who struggles with a heroin addiction. The story opens as the brother reads of Sonny’s arrest, and he tries to untangle the mystery of how they have both arrived at this day. A former friend of Sonny’s has sought out his brother to give him this bad news, which he already knows. As they talk, the world Sonny’s brother seeks to inhabit and the world that actually surrounds him clash. What is even clearer is the brother’s willed blindness to the complexity and some of the beauty that coexist in this world. He refuses to try to help Sonny out of this present trouble, partly out of a sense that he cannot really help and partly from his sense of previous injury from being dismissed by Sonny the last time they had seen each other. As the story unfolds, however, and the protagonist loses his own young daughter, he says, “My trouble made Sonny’s real,” so he writes to him. When Sonny writes back, compassionately and humbly, expressing his sorrow about Grace’s death and saying how happy he is to hear from him, they begin a correspondence, which ends by his inviting Sonny to stay with his family when he is released. Sonny’s brother works hard at trying to discover who Sonny is and to understand his life in the hope that he can solve the mystery of Sonny’s addiction and protect him from falling again. His efforts take him back to various scenes of their youth, specifically an encounter with his mother before she died in which he learns for the first time of his father’s brother. She tells him the story of his uncle’s tragic death at the hands of careless joyriding whites as an explanation of his father’s secret sadness and anger and as a parable warning him about the dangers that may lie in wait for these brothers. She ends by asking him to

look after his brother, and when he promises that he will not let anything happen to him, she says, “You may not be able to stop nothing from happening. But you got to let him know you’s there.” Now that Sonny has reentered his life, he tries to make good on this promise. Yet he struggles to understand what seems to be at the core of Sonny’s being, his life as a jazz and blues musician. He is equally baffled and afraid of Sonny’s addiction, suspecting that the two are somehow linked. The story reaches its climax when he attends a club at which Sonny is playing again for the fi rst time since he has been released. It is the first time he has entered Sonny’s world. Here Sonny is greeted as a “prince,” a gifted artist charged with the mission of all serious artists—to help us face ourselves, even in our darkness, and bear compassionate witness to each other. The tale ends as he salutes his brother’s art, finally understanding the terrible price exacted from the artist for his art (as with Robert Johnson and those who try to play his guitar in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, where the physical act of playing this music literally cuts up their fingers as they make contact with the strings). As he reaches some understanding of Sonny’s calling and the complexities and real dangers (past addiction) of Sonny’s effort to heed that call, he also faces truths about himself as an individual and as part of the greater human family. “Sonny’s Blues” is a complex work that interweaves ideas about the role of the artist, and the twin necessities of facing difficult truths about ourselves and treating each other with compassion. Baldwin develops character through his use of dialogue and his subtle use of point of view. The story challenges our notions of what is good by making Sonny, a drug addict and felon, the central character and hero of the story. While Sonny’s brother has all the trappings we recognize of a desired lifestyle, a good job, a wife and family, and a home, crucial elements are missing. From the beginning of the story, he is confused, unable to understand the lives of those around him, including the students he aims to educate. Because he does not seem able to recognize or understand their lives, he seems unable to reach them, as he has been unable to reach Sonny. Therefore, he must seek what he is missing—what he has simply been unwilling or

James Baldwin 23

unable to face about the similarity of all their lives. Likewise, Sonny raises questions not easily answered. Is it necessary for the artist to self-destruct in the service of his art? Is there a way to attend seriously to the “call” of art, especially within the constraints of racial and economic injustice, without succumbing to self-destruction? The story also raises questions about what we owe each other and what we can really do to assist each other on life’s journey.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the ways in which Baldwin introduces and develops his key themes in this story. Focus on the two conversations the brothers have when they are alone: the first, which occurs after their mother’s funeral, and the second after Sonny has been released from prison: (a) What is the content, the subject of these conversations? (b) What is each brother’s attitude toward the other in these conversations? What words, phrases, or other details indicate this? (c) Describe the changes that occur during the course of these conversations. (d) How do these details reveal Baldwin’s themes? 2. Compare Sonny’s brother’s reaction to the gospel street singers he views from the window of his apartment to Sonny’s response to them, both as his brother observes him and later as he talks about that scene with him. What do reactions reveal about their different characters? 3. Baldwin chooses to tell this tale primarily through the eyes of Sonny’s brother. Look closely at the way he opens and closes the story. What effect does it have on the story to limit what we know of his view?

The Fire Next Time (1963) Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. 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 others—do not falter in

our 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, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” (James Baldwin) The Fire Next Time is a Baldwin classic; much of his reputation was built on this work. Published at what some call the height of civil rights activity (the march on Washington occurred in August of the year in which it was published), it marks a distinct shift in Baldwin’s articulation of his ideas about the threat of racial prejudice. In earlier works like Notes of a Native Son, he primarily examined the threats to the black psyche of living with racial hatred, describing such hatred as an infectious disease that could infect and kill the black man. In this text he enlarges on that theme and more urgently warns both black and white audiences of what may await us if we fail in this hour of need. He calls himself a witness but speaks to us in language that earned him the rightful title of prophet. Written and published after he had ended his expatriate period and begun participating in the civil rights struggle, The Fire Next Time anticipates the riots and escalating violence of the late 1960s and 1970s. Readers are struck by the ominous resonance of the quote, which ends the book. This collection is composed of two essays beginning with an open letter to Baldwin’s nephew, his namesake. The younger James is apparently turning 15, so on this occasion, coinciding with the nation’s 100th anniversary of the emancipation of its slave population, Baldwin writes “My Dungeon Shook: A Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation.” In this letter Baldwin announces his intention to pass on his strategies for survival in a hostile environment. More than that, he wants to offer a way for his nephew to achieve full manhood, full humanity, in a world where the odds are against him. Letters like this, from elders to the next generation, form a small genre of their own, especially in African-American writing. Baldwin’s famous one was followed soon after in 1968 by Bob

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Teague’s Letters to a Black Boy written to his son and, more recently in 1992, Marian Wright Edelman’s The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours. They share a sense of urgency—the wisdom the writers seek to pass on must be passed on at this point to be useful to the recipient. They also share admonitions, especially those from the African-American community, about the necessity of achieving a fully adult, conscious, and compassionately human stance. The second essay of the collection, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” is a letter to the American public. It echoes and enlarges on themes sounded in the first essay, but this time Baldwin uses two important personal encounters. Revisiting lessons he learned at 14 through his own experience of salvation, he explores its aftermath and an evening with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in Chicago at the height of the Black Muslim movement to launch his analysis of the current American dilemma. Together, the two essays move, in Baldwin’s classic style, from the personal, one-on-one intimacy of passing wisdom to a beloved nephew (he reminds him never to forget that love) to a conversation with the entire U.S. populace. He evokes not only the history of black and white Americans but also their connections through that history to the West and to the whole world. At the heart of his letter to his nephew, and therefore to all black children and children of the oppressed, are three messages: (1) Do not believe what the world tries to tell you about your worth; (2) Know your real past in order to learn who you really are; and (3) Accept responsibility but avoid hatred. Baldwin begins with the admonition that his nephew (and nieces, too) should face a difficult but important truth: “You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (14). He acknowledges that everything in the world of a poor black boy born in Harlem is constructed to make him believe in his worthlessness and in his inability ever to overcome what he sees all around him—despair and destruction. Baldwin points out that this not only is his nephew’s dilemma but has been the problem the black man has wrestled with throughout American history. His own brother,

young James’s father, has also struggled with this reality. The fact that the struggle remains the same and that those who cause it do not acknowledge its existence makes it so insidious: I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they are destroying hundreds and thousands of lives and do not know and do not want to know it. . . . But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime. (15–16)

Baldwin explains this condition, explicitly naming racism as its root cause. “You were born where you were born and faced the future you faced because you were black and for no other reason” (18). He thinks it is vital that those living within the constraints of racism accurately perceive and name what constrains them and then make it their business to understand how and why. He labors to provide those answers, at least in part, through his analysis in the rest of the essay. Again he exhorts his nephew to learn about his past in order to understand the present and construct a livable future. To this he adds the most important message of all. Despite the details of black history, the documentation of oppression both personal and impersonal, it is imperative, according to Baldwin’s view, that young James not give in to hatred and bitterness: Please be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. (19)

James Baldwin 25

He was both lauded and criticized in the 1970s and 1980s for this stance. When it was originally published, it was hailed as courageous and “straight from the shoulder.” But in the heyday of the black arts movement, critics pointed to this call for love in the face of hatred, this call for black people to “save” undeserving whites, as evidence that Baldwin was still a “Negro” rather than a black man, someone seeking the understanding (and perhaps approval) of at least the white intellectual and arts community. And while Baldwin makes an eloquent case for the necessity that his nephew and other blacks achieve the last goal, this letter fails to explain how such a thing is to be accomplished. Yet, what the next essay makes much clearer is why he thinks this is the Black Man’s Burden. “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind,” the second essay, opens with the irony of the quote from Rudyard Kipling about taking up “the White Man’s Burden,” immediately followed by a quote from a hymn about seeking salvation and cleansing “down at the cross.” These two quotes establish major concerns. First, they dispel delusions whites have harbored about their relations to all nonwhite peoples and especially white Americans in their relations to black Americans. Second, they show the necessity of acknowledging these “sins” and taking collective responsibility to seek cleansing from them, a cleansing that has already required blood and may require more. It is aptly subtitled “From a Region in My Mind” because the essay ranges over a large territory. The ground it covers includes personal experiences analyzed for their meanings within the context of sociological, political, historical, and ethical contexts. Baldwin examines his salvation, for example, analyzing it through the lens of the cultural factors and pressures that conspired to bring him to his knees, seeking shelter from the harsh realities that menaced him in his Harlem neighborhood. He determines that many people seek the shelter of the church for the same reasons he did—because they begin to recognize that the menace of the streets is a personal menace from which they need shelter. But, for Baldwin, the church is no hiding place; it poses the same threat—to take one’s life—but under a different guise.

Likewise, he describes an evening spent in the company of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and a group of his followers, analyzing the ideology of the Black Muslim movement for what it offers for black Americans. As he does so, he provides an outline of the theology of the movement, a discussion of its connections to earlier similar movements, and he explores the economic factors funding the movement itself and the economic strategy it offers its followers. He also analyzes why these ideas have appealed to large groups of African Americans who were drawn to the Black Muslim camp in the 1960s, and the equally intriguing response of the white power establishment to that phenomenon. Baldwin describes the police officers assigned to keep an eye on the crowds drawn to the Muslim preachers in the parks as being afraid. He goes to some lengths to explain that he cannot argue with the truth of the Black Muslim assessment of race relations in the United States, nor with Malcolm X’s analysis that it is unreasonable to expect that black people should be any more patient, loving, and forgiving than any other humans. In fact, Baldwin himself is so critical of the inadequacies and blindness of white responses to racism that after one televised appearance, a man says that he expects Baldwin will be calling himself “X” soon. But Baldwin argues: The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder. . . . I am very much concerned that American Negroes achieve their freedom here in the United States. But I am also concerned for their dignity, the health of their souls, and must oppose any attempt that Negroes make to do to others what has been done to them. (112–113)

This is the crux of his argument in both letters. With his salvation story and the Elijah Muhammad story in mind, he critiques Christianity. He seeks to identify the source of the delusions that whites and blacks have succumbed to, contrasting these distortions with considerations of alternate views of history: what the Holocaust reveals about Western depravity and what the treatment of black

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soldiers in World War II reveals about American hypocrisy. In doing so, he criticizes white liberalism, in particular, and warns all of us about the seductions of power. In one of the most powerful parts of this text, Baldwin issues a warning that resonates in a special way in the United States after Sept. 11, 2001. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant—birth, struggle, death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so. . . . But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not—safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope—the entire possibility—of freedom disappears. (125)

5.

This is a message readers can consider to be applicable to many current situations.

6.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Consider the title of the fi rst letter, “My Dungeon Shook,” and the quote that it is taken from, stated at the opening of the text. It seems to allude to the story of St. Paul, who, when he found himself in a Roman dungeon awaiting trial, had the miraculous experience of rescue by an angel, when his “chains fell off.” How might this story help illuminate or underline the points Baldwin makes in this essay? What other ways can you think of to interpret the title? 2. In terms of your reading of the letter to his nephew, what assumptions does Baldwin seem to make about what the younger James does or does not know about black history? 3. Select any historical event Baldwin identifies in the second essay and investigate it further. What seems to be the common way to interpret this event? For example, what are the reasons commonly given for the Cuban response to communist/socialist politics? How does this explanation fit with Baldwin’s? 4. Many writers of fiction are also essayists. Their essays are often inspired by some cause with

7.

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which they are passionately aligned. Choose a well-known fiction writer who is also an essayist, such as Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, or Wendell Berry. Read at least two of their essays and (a) identify the target audience if you can, (b) articulate the problem the essay outlines, and (c) detail the solutions it proposes. Compare that work to Baldwin’s. Miriama Ba, a Senegalese woman, has written a novel called So Long a Letter that treats a variety of social customs and ills in the context of the story it tells. Likewise, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is a novel written in letter form. Use one of these works or choose another—a novel written as letters—to compare with Baldwin’s nonfiction letters. What similarities and differences do you observe? How do those differences in form affect meaning or impact? Consider Baldwin’s call to radical love, outside the bounds of religion, as a means to social and political salvation. Investigate other calls like his from different sources—bell hooks and Alice Walker, for example. Is there anyone on the political scene these days who espouses such a doctrine? If so, how does that person’s call compare with Baldwin’s? How is it received? Look closely at Baldwin’s language in either of the letters. Identify two passages that you think express his message powerfully. Explain your response. In terms of the critique he offers in these letters, how would Baldwin evaluate Hemingway’s male characters or those of Faulkner? Choose one specific novel. Identify the traits of the male heroes in that novel. What would Baldwin agree were heroic traits? Which ones would he challenge? In Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, as in other contemporary tales of Native American life, the young men seek their identities. On the basis of your reading of Baldwin’s work, recast his letter to address young Native Americans. What would you have to change? What could remain the same? Why?

James Baldwin 27

Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964) The dedication to this play “To the memory of Medgar Evers, and his wife and his children and to the memory of the dead children of Birmingham,” places it both in time and in attitude. Written and published in the wake of the Emmett Till case and after the death of Medgar Evers, Blues for Mr. Charlie was also published immediately after four girls were killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed on a Sunday morning. Baldwin returned to the United States in 1957 and toured the South for the first time out of his personal need to observe what was happening there as the Civil Rights movement gained momentum. He used this opportunity and helped finance his travels by agreeing to write his observations for Partisan Review and Harpers Magazine. During that tour, he met many leaders of the Civil Rights movement, most notably M ARTIN LUTHER K ING, JR. He saw King in action, met with him personally, and heard him preach. Baldwin also learned about racial violence, southern style, in this and subsequent trips. These observations would fuel his writing for the coming years. The Emmett Till case, for example, inspired the play Blues for Mr. Charlie. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi during the summer of 1955. Till reportedly looked at and said something deemed inappropriate to the white wife of the store’s proprietor. Later that day, he was taken from his relatives’ home, beaten, and shot. His body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His case caused a sensation when his mother demanded that the casket be opened so that the world could see what was done to her son. This became a celebrated cause among civil rights activists. As early as 1959, Baldwin promised Elia Kazan a play based on this story, but circumstances had not yet come together. In subsequent trips to the South, Baldwin’s commitment to active participation in the movement grew. On one of those trips, he met and accompanied Medgar Evers as he investigated for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) murders that were reported as being com-

mitted against blacks because of racial hatred. Evers himself was murdered three months after Baldwin left the South in 1963. David Leeming reports that “his outrage at the Evers murder spurred him on in his work on Blues for Mr. Charlie.” Then, in September 1963, four girls (three were 14 and one was 11) died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In each of these three cases, the perpetrators were identified and arrested. But when they came to trial, all were exonerated the first time. (Efforts to bring about justice were eventually successful, but only after years of persistence. For example, Evers’s murderer was only successfully convicted in 1994, over 30 years after the murder). These events are part of the violent backdrop for the play, as escalating violence and a growing sense of futility engendered a shift in attitude among blacks agitating for racial justice. A debate about methods, represented on one hand by the nonviolent methods of Martin Luther King, Jr., and on the other by the militant resistance of Malcolm X and later the Black Panther Party gathered momentum in the early 1960s. Blues for Mr. Charlie incorporates that debate. The play is structured in three acts; Baldwin’s stage directions establish the primary settings as “the Negro church” for the first two acts and the courthouse for the final act. He also divides stage between two primary locations, identified as BlackTown and WhiteTown. The play begins as Lorenzo Britten, a white store owner and family man, drops the body of Richard Henry and says, “And may every nigger like this nigger end like this nigger, face down in the weeds!” The focus of the play is bringing Britten to trial and revealing the racial injustice that has led to Richard’s murder. The play also becomes a vehicle for examining the root of this shift in the temper of the times. Meridian Henry is the black preacher/Martin Luther King, Jr., leader figure. He is Richard Henry’s father, and Richard is the black man who has been murdered. In the fi rst scene, Meridian is drilling a group of young people in nonviolent methods when the group is joined by another group of

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protesters fresh from the field of battle. One of the newly arrived protesters articulates the growing bitterness and impatience of the young people with these techniques in the face of the continuing hostility of whites: We’ve been demonstrating—non-violently—for more than a year now and all that’s happened is that now they’ll let us into that crummy library downtown which was obsolete in 1897. . . . For that we paid I don’t know how many thousands of dollars in fines, Jerome is still in the hospital, and we all know Ruthie is never again going to be the swinging little chick she used to be. . . . And we still can’t get licensed to be electricians or plumbers, we still can’t walk through the park, our kids still can’t use the swimming pool in town. We still can’t vote, we can’t even get registered. Is it worth it? And these people trying to kill us, too?

Meridian’s responses, including his expressed belief that the agitation of Parnell, the white editor of the local paper, will get a warrant issued for Britten’s arrest, is met with skepticism and near-scorn by the black students. However, Parnell does come through though he leaves them on his way to alert Britten, his friend, that the warrant is on the way. Baldwin strives to render the complexities of racial relations in the South as well as the complexities of individual characters. Thus, Parnell professes and tries to demonstrate his friendship for both parties. Yet Meridian challenges Parnell’s motives and his willingness to pursue justice by demanding that he should seek to find out the truth about Britten’s responsibility for Richard’s murder and act accordingly, for his own sake. Furthermore, when Britten next appears on stage, he is holding his baby. In this intimate family scene he is a family man who really loves his wife and child, reminiscent of the people described in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” where the mob “hurling spittle, rock, Garbage and fruit” at the children attempting to integrate the high school “are like people everywhere.” This is echoed in the scene in which the white community joins together to offer

moral support to the Britten family. These folks are then implicated in violence in the scene of black community members’ calling to warn each other that the whites are out setting bombs and in other ways seeking to intimidate, if not injure, blacks. Nor is Richard, the murdered man, the pristine hero who might have been expected. He has returned home to deal with his addiction. And though he does not initiate the hostility that ends in his death, he certainly exacerbates it in his encounter with Britten and his wife in their store. The play ends by suggesting a limited hope in the joining of forces between the white liberals and the black community in a continued effort to seek justice. But it also leaves the challenges and questions Lorenzo voices in the beginning of the play ringing in the air. The title suggests that “the white day is done” (“Dream Variations,” Langston Hughes), but it ends with no immediate achievement of that sought-for justice in sight.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Baldwin uses the scenes with intimate conversations between characters to undermine stereotyping. Look at two scenes—one between two black characters and another between two white characters. What do these characters talk about when they are alone? How do their reactions differ from what you might expect? What additional information does each scene provide about the characters? About the plot? About the themes? 2. Baldwin often asserted that the root of racial violence was in the close association of race with sex. Is there evidence of this in the play? What associations are made between race and sex? Who makes these associations? How are these connected to the violence in the play? 3. Another issue that surfaces is the connection of religion to the struggle for racial equality. What is the role of religion in the play? Who speaks for religion? How is the role of religion questioned or challenged? Look for details in the setting as well as in the dialogue to support your ideas. 4. What roles do women play in Blues for Mr. Charlie? Is there any distinction between the roles of the white women and those of the black women?

James Baldwin 29

If so, what are they? If not, what meaning does this convey? 5. Plays unfold primarily through dialogue. And the success of a play often depends on how well the dialogue captures the audience’s idea of how “real” people talk, how clearly it conveys the plot, and how effectively it moves the plot along. Select one scene and use these standards to analyze Baldwin’s work in this play. 6. In his earliest years, Baldwin gained a reputation by denouncing Richard Wright’s Native Son and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as protest novels that fall short of art by emphasizing “message.” In his critiques, Baldwin argues that their efforts cause them to exaggerate features of their characters to embody the ideas each writer wants to discuss. Consider this critique as it applies to this play. What evidence from the play can you use to support the idea that Blues for Mr. Charlie is a protest play or that it avoids the failings of protest literature? 7. The most common themes in blues music are about love lost or the agonies of love. This play can be interpreted in this light on several different levels. That is, different kinds of love lost and gone wrong can be identified in this text. Which ones can you identify?

“The Rockpile”

(in Going to Meet the Man 1965) “The Rockpile” is a version of an incident incorporated in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, published for the first time in his collection of short stories. It focuses on the relationship between John Grimes and his brother, Roy. John is the protagonist of the novel; likewise, he is the central figure of this short story. Through this story, readers see his relationship to each of his parents as well as to his surroundings. The story opens on a Saturday morning. Both brothers are sitting on the fire escape outside of their Harlem apartment, several stories above street level. They are confined to this space because they are forbidden to go down into the street to play with

the other boys. They are especially forbidden to join those boys on the rock pile. The rock pile of the title is apparently the closest thing to a playground available in that neighborhood and has become a kind of proving ground for boys growing up there. It is a place where they hang out and challenge each other. In the story it is described as “a mass of natural rock jutting out of the ground,” and its slippery surface provides the boys with an element of danger and some excitement to alleviate the tedium of poverty. But Gabriel, John and Roy’s father, refuses to allow them to play there. Elizabeth, their mother, agrees, but not for the same reasons. Thus we are introduced to the first set of conflicts. Gabriel will not give his permission because he does not want them associating with worldly people; for him, the boys as well as the other people in the neighborhood who are not members of his church are part of the evil temptations of the world. Elizabeth, on the other hand, refuses her permission because of the physical dangers the rock pile itself poses to life and limb. So the boys are relegated to watching other boys play there from their fire escape. Predictably, their parents’ refusal makes the rock pile alluring to both boys. However, the boys respond differently to this attraction. John fears the rock pile and the tough boys who seem to rule over it. He is fascinated with watching their play but seems happy enough to simply observe from a distance. Although he is also restless in his confi nement, he seems more willing to accept this imposed safety. Besides, John has the comfort of a book, his mother not too far away, and his father out of the house for the moment. Roy is a different case altogether. We can see how Roy chafes at being forbidden this physical play and from associating with “regular” guys. So on this particular Saturday, Roy slips out to join his friends there. They have been urging him to join them. He takes the opportunity presented when his mother is deep in conversation with a church member, Sister McCandless, to defy his older brother and join them. For his part, John does not tell his mother or try very hard to stop him. For a time, he simply watches, primarily worried for both of them should his brother be caught by their father, who is scheduled to return from work shortly. Roy is injured,

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however, and this injury heightens the tension of the story and reveals the depths of the family tensions. Each individual’s reactions illuminate the troubled relationships of the characters. Elizabeth’s anxious anticipation of Gabriel’s reaction, which surpasses her concern about Roy’s injury once she ascertains that it is not life-threatening, makes readers question the nature of her relationship with her husband. Likewise, even Sister McCandless offers to meet Gabriel as he ascends the stairs in order to soften his reaction. Indeed, everyone is more concerned with his reaction than with Roy’s wound after it has been established that Roy will be all right. In this way, Baldwin creates and maintains suspense. But he also creates a character who looms over the whole story, but whom, we realize in retrospect we do not meet until almost halfway through it. Such is Gabriel’s power and influence over those around him. We are affected by the growing dread with which all of the participants await his entry, particularly John. We are somewhat unprepared, however, for the explosiveness and the direction of Gabriel’s response to the situation. Baldwin creates memorable characters and paints a vivid portrait of a family struggling within both internal and external trip wires. The Harlem streets, we recognize, are dangerous for these boys—physically as well as in every other way (see “Sonny’s Blues”), but the story raises questions about which environment is more dangerous to them—their father’s protection or the city streets. The themes Baldwin treats here are similar to those in many of his other works—the search for identity manifested in confusion John feels as he examines himself in comparison to his brother, the neighborhood boys, and his father’s expectations. He also returns to an analysis of adult relationships through the tension between Elizabeth and Gabriel. Baldwin continues, also, to question the effect of Christianity, interpreted through Gabriel’s fundamentalist rigidity, on the lives of humans struggling for truth in relationships and life. This last theme is especially interesting to think about in comparison with writers like FLANNERY O’CONNOR, and Reynolds Price, and especially evoked in similar

ways in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Gabriel’s rigidity and the destructiveness of his controlling efforts also evoke comparisons with Mr. in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and the Third Life of Grange Copeland.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Both brothers resist their father. Compare their forms of resistance and examine the effectiveness of each. 2. Look at the relationship of the two women (Sister McCandless and Elizabeth) to each other and in their reactions to the boys as well as to Gabriel’s return home. What does an examination of their differences reveal? 3. The short story format needs to provide information about character, plot, theme, and setting quickly and clearly. That means that the details must be sharp and sometimes accomplish multiple tasks. Writers accomplish this, for example, by using one descriptive phrase that furthers the action of the story while it also provides insight into the character. Identify three or four such details in this story. Look carefully at the word choices and the phrasing. How much work is being done by each of your selections? Be specific. 4. Examine the details of the external setting (outside the apartment). How does Baldwin indicate the dangers in it? How does he indicate the dangers within the household? Who is endangered by whom and in what ways? Which dangers seem greatest to you and why? 5. Find the section in Go Tell It on the Mountain in which Roy is wounded. How is he injured, according to the novel? What details of the scene remain the same? Which have been changed? What is gained and what is lost in the different versions of this episode? 6. Compare the parent-child relationships in this story to others that you know: for example, Scout and Atticus in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Hannah and Eva in Toni Morrison’s Sula, the mother and son in Ernest Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray,” or the grandmother and all her relations in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to

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Find.” What creates tension in these relationships? What causes the tensions? What contributes to positive ones? How do these different writers help you see and understand underlying causes? What aspects of “craft” can you identify by examining how these different authors have approached these ideas?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON BALDWIN AND HIS WORK 1. Consider Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” (the essay), “Sonny’s Blues,” “The Rockpile,” and “My Dungeon Shook” (from The Fire Next Time). Each of these shorter pieces deals with the complex struggles of coming of age, especially for a young black man in the late 20th century. First, identify what Baldwin points to as the major obstacles such a young man must overcome, both internal and external. Where does Baldwin indicate that the young man might find real assistance? If you line up these pieces by publication date, can you discern any changes in thinking? Would you describe such changes as a “progression” or not? Explain your view. 2. Baldwin worked back and forth across several genres—essays, short stories, novels, and plays. Select two of his works from different genres that examine similar themes or characters. Pay attention to the ways he communicates information about these themes or characters within the demands or constraints of the genre. On the basis of this study, what do you understand those demands or constraints to be? Provide evidence from the texts. 3. Baldwin’s works are often compared to those of other writers who examine race. Two authors with whom he might be compared are William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Select a specific novel from each author, perhaps Faulkner’s Go Down Moses, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Note the ways in which the effects of race are introduced and elaborated. How do such concerns manifest themselves in the characters and character relationships? Are

the characters complex? Do they strike you as “real”? If so, what contributes to their reality? If not, what gets in the way? 4. Faulkner, Morrison, and Baldwin might also be compared in their use of language. Select any one of their works in which you feel their language is particularly striking. (Morrison’s passages of description in Song of Solomon and in Beloved are often quoted. Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying might be good starting places.) What uses of language—turns of phrase, metaphors, or others, distinguish each writer’s work? In other words, how can a knowledgeable reader identify a passage from Faulkner versus one from Baldwin besides the content? What writers do you think of as writing beautifully? Compare the specifics of that writer’s style to that of Baldwin in whatever work you consider his best. What does paying attention to these writers’ word choice and the specifics of their styles teach an attentive reader? 5. Readers are sometimes concerned about the ethics of authors’ creating characters across racial, ethnic, and gender lines. William Styron, for example, was critiqued heavily for his version of the black revolutionary Nat Turner. Yet in Giovanni’s Room and in several short stories, Baldwin’s protagonists are white. Consider his depiction of these characters. How authentic do they seem? What contributes to or works against this authenticity? 6. Both Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Reynolds Price’s The Good Priest’s Son employ the triple concerns of tangled family relations, the complications of religion, and the tensions of race (with economic, gender, and, in the case of Price and Baldwin’s work, sexual orientation issues). Consider the work of these writers in comparison with Baldwin’s, especially with Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room. Are there noticeable differences in the way these subjects are treated? Are these differences attributable to a change in the times in which they were written and published? If so, which ones? (Evidence from the texts, please). Which is most striking? Why?

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WORKS CITED

AND

ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

“American Masters. James Baldwin | PBS.” American Masters. PBS. July 6, 2006. Available online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/baldwin_j.html. Accessed May 21, 2007. Baldwin, James. The Amen Corner: A Play. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1968. ———. Blues for Mr. Charlie: A Play. New York: Dial Press, 1964. ———.Early Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1998. ———.The Fire Next Time. New York: Dell, 1962. ———. Giovanni’s Room: A Novel. New York: Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1956. ———. Going to Meet the Man. New York: Dial Press, 1965. ———. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Dell (A Laurel Book), 1952. ———. Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial Press, 1963. Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2006. Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Harris, Trudier. Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. ———, ed. New Essays on “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Henderson, Carol E. James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain: Historical and Critical Essays. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974.

Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. McBride, Dwight A., ed. James Baldwin Now. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Miller, D. Quentin, ed. Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. “Online Media: UC Berkeley Lectures and Events (James Baldwin Audio Recordings).” Online Media: UC Berkeley Lectures and Events. Library, University of California, Berkeley Press, July 6, 2006. Available online. URL: http://www.lib. berkeley.edu/MRC/audiofiles.html#baldwina. Accessed May 21, 2007. Porter, Horace. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Pratt, Louis H. James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Rosset, Lisa. James Baldwin. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Scott, Lynn Orilla. James Baldwin’s Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002. Standley Fred L., and Nancy V. Burt, eds. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Troupe, Quincy, ed. James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Weatherby, W. J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989.

Deborah James

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) The novel can’t be compared to the epic, or to the monuments of poetic drama. But it is the best we can do just now. It is a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter. A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony and even justice. (Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1976)

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biographical The Adventures of Augie March, perhaps his most celebrated work, to a number of fragments of memoir, Bellow details his childhood. In a speech given in 1970, he described his early life in Canada as “blessed with a sense of the exotic.” He goes on: “I don’t see how this could have been avoided. Say in my case: I was born in a French-Canadian village of Russian-Jewish parents in 1915. We had Indians, French-Canadians, Scottish and Irish, Ukrainians, Jews, Russians and so on. Every language was spoken in the streets—from Iroquois to Hebrew. How could you avoid the feeling that you were in an enchanted place?” (“Saul Bellow on America and American Jewish Writers”). Bellow carried this “exotic” upbringing throughout his life, making it the prototype for many of the enchanted landscapes he would paint in his fiction, as well as the launching pad for the standpoint of alienated observer he would often adopt for his gifted raconteur protagonists. In 1924 the Bellow family moved from this exotic multiethnic space to the great American city of Chicago—itself a city defined by its plurality of nationalities and diversity of languages. It was the heyday of the city’s industrial might, an era during which the midwestern Mecca played host to a number of waves of immigration, Jewish and other. Bellow and his siblings fit right into the Humboldt Park immigrant neighborhood where his family settled in search of higher wages and more job security. The local toughs and spectacular urban beauty that feature in

aul Bellow was born on June 10, 1915, in a multiethnic suburb of Montreal called Lachine, the younger son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lescha and Abraham Bellow. Bellow’s parents moved to a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal a few years after his birth to escape their hardscrabble existence in working-class Lachine. Although Bellow was born in the New World, his family’s recent immigrant past would haunt the author throughout his life. The youngest of four children, he was the only member of his family to be born in Canada; his elder brothers, Sam and Maurice, and his sister, Jane, were born and spent their earliest years in St. Petersburg, Russia, during one of their father’s ill-fated attempts to start a business outside the Pale of Settlement usually reserved for Jewish habitation. Even the author’s name was marked by this immigrant Jewish past. A meddlesome Canadian border bureaucrat changed the family’s name from Belo to Bellow in 1913, and Saul himself transformed his name from the more traditionally Jewish Solomon to Saul when he decided to embark upon a writing career. Most notably, though, the imprint of Bellow’s early life can be felt in the remarkable innovation of his prose, which many critics have argued is inflected with the Yiddish spoken during his childhood by his parents and others in their Jewish neighborhood in Montreal. Bellow returned to this early life once and again in his prose. In works from the semiauto-

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Bellow’s novels and short story collections from The Adventures of Augie March to Him with His Foot in His Mouth arose from the author’s romanticization of his upbringing in this archetypal American city, where the smells wafting from the slaughterhouses and the many ethnic bakeries competed for attention. The fact that Chicago was simultaneously a business and manufacturing center of the United States and a locale far from the intellectual and cultural elitism of the East Coast metropolises, New York and Boston, combined to influence Bellow’s democratic vision and the petty criminals and autodidactic intellectuals who swam through his work. As James Atlas has noted in his definitive biography of the author, Chicago played the urban muse for many of Bellow’s most popular works. Along with a number of would-be young Jewish artists and intellectuals from his neighborhood, Bellow attended Tuley High School in Chicago, where academic achievement and literary ambition were prized far above athletic prowess or social acumen. A competent student who wrote a newspaper column, Bellow was nonetheless overshadowed by his brilliant best friend, Isaac Rosenfeld, who had early success as a writer in New York City after college, only to die young and without the clout of his fellow Tuley grad. When Bellow was in his last year of high school, his mother, Lescha—the parent to whom he was closer— died. As Bellow puts it, “I was never the same after my mother died. . . . I was grieving” (Atlas 35). The theme of unceasing grief for a lost mother would recur in many of Bellow’s later works, most notably his novella Seize the Day (1956). After high school the melancholic Bellow worked intermittently at his father’s coal transport company, encountering the colorful characters and rogue’s gallery of grotesques he would depict in his fiction, particularly the autobiographical The Adventures of Augie March. Bellow also became a perennial student at this time, first at the University of Chicago and later at Northwestern, where he received his B.A. in anthropology in 1937. Bellow studied with the famous anthropologist Melville Herskovitz at Northwestern; a short time after Bellow was his student, Herskovitz would compose his famous work, The Myth of the Negro Past, often seen as the foundation of African-American stud-

ies. Bellow was profoundly influenced by his professor’s work on race, as well as the work of the earlier anthropologist Franz Boas, whose study of the Inuit tribes of the North inspired Bellow to write his senior thesis on what he perceived as a fascinating “primitive” Eskimo tribe. Although Bellow did not graduate from the University of Chicago and often mocked the pretensions of its Great Books curriculum, he often returned to it in both his fiction and his personal life. For many years, he served as a professor in the Committee for Social Thought at the esteemed Chicago university, developing friendships with a number of well-known academics who resided at the school, such as Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss. After graduating from Northwestern, Bellow began graduate work in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Bellow’s preoccupation with describing the minutiae of daily life and social interactions from an anthropological remove in his fiction resulted from this period of study. Although he was interested in pursuing graduate studies in English literature, he chose anthropology, he later said, because it was a field of study friendlier to working-class Jewish boys like him. At the time that Bellow attended university, literature departments were still primarily the domain of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite, self-conscious gatekeepers of the English tradition. Many future critics agreed that it was precisely Bellow’s eschewal of the hallowed halls of the English literary tradition that led to his own literary freedom and sense of linguistic play, as well as the pluralistic viewpoint of his fiction. After a short time at Wisconsin, Bellow dropped out to pursue his creative passions. On winter break, he married the University of Chicago student Anita Goshkin and decided to stay on with his new wife in Chicago. Bellow soon found work, a part-time teaching post at a local teacher’s college that paid little but allowed the budding artist time to concentrate on his craft. It was the depression, and Bellow was happy to have a position that would allow him to leave the ranks of the city’s many unemployed. Despite the fee he earned teaching, however, Bellow applied for and received federal aid from FDR’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Along with noted Chicago writers such as James Farrell, Bellow worked at the

Saul Bellow 35

Federal Writers’ Project, composing biographical entries on famous authors to keep busy. Soon after his first piece of fiction, entitled “Two Morning Monologues,” was published in Partisan Review, Bellow’s wife, Anita, gave birth to their son Gregory. Dangling Man, Bellow’s first novel, was loosely based on his young economically strapped married life in Chicago as the inhabitant of a claustrophobic home with his wife and her parents. Bellow finished the novel during his brief service with the U.S. Merchant Marine. The novel, published in 1944, relates the story of a young wannabe writer, Joseph, who is living with his wife and her family and dreaming of a career as an exemplar of American letters. In this novella Bellow evinced his first engagement with a theme that would recur throughout the pages of his fiction: the collision between the individual and world history. In Dangling Man, Bellow’s protagonist waits in existential limbo to be drafted into war, trying to carve out an artistic life in the shadow of staggering global events. In this early work and The Victim, published in 1947, Bellow manifested his devotion and indebtedness to the 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Originally called Notes of a Dangling Man, Bellow’s 1944 work was written as a clear homage to the Russian great’s Notes from Underground, a meticulously rendered novella about one disaffected young man’s search for meaning and the tortured consciousness that results from his quest. The Victim, too, tells a Dostoevskian story, this time of an individual and the doppelganger, or double, that haunts him. In Bellow’s second work— his first to be published after the global catastrophes of World War II—he hints at the offstage tragedies and mass victimization of the war, focusing on how a Jewish man named Leventhal is made a victim by his passivity and the guilt he feels about not being able to help his increasingly anti-Semitic double, Albee. In an interview with Philip Roth, Bellow later called these early short novels “apprentice works,” analogous to the master’s degree one must complete before beginning to work on a Ph.D. thesis. In order to impress the Partisan Review crew, the Trotskyite New York intellectuals who edited and wrote for the small, intellectually rigorous magazine and literary tastemaker of the time, Bellow also wrote and pub-

lished a short story about the exile of Stalin’s former second in command called “The Mexican General.” In The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Bellow dazzled readers with a new tone far from the formal one he had employed in his early works. While Bellow sought to demonstrate his capacity to mimic the masters of 19th-century European prose, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in his young prose, The Adventures of Augie March marked the moment when the author developed a voice of his own. The voice that narrates the picaresque adventures of young Augie March, a Jewish boy growing up in a Chicago neighborhood much like the one in which Bellow spent his youth, is a mature, yet rollicking one, inflected with tones of immigrant life and the spirit of play that characterized much subsequent Jewish-American fiction from Philip Roth’s to Cynthia Ozick’s. The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow’s third novel, won the National Book Award for fiction in 1954. During this period, Bellow began to engage with historical questions in his work, an unsurprising fact given how often he was just offstage during the major events of 20th-century world history. Bellow went to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1948, not long after the end of World War II and the occupation of France by the Nazis. Bellow’s fellowship allowed him to spend two years living in Paris and traveling in Europe, including Spain, the nation so central to the consciousness of socialists during its civil war in the 1930s. It was during this time, while witnessing the aftereffects of the war and struggling to write his later-abandoned manuscript “The Crab and the Butterfly,” that he began The Adventures of Augie March. Later, during the 1967 Six Day War in Israel, he served as a correspondent for Newsday, a move that inspired his first extended nonfiction work, To Jerusalem and Back, as well as the Israeli travelogue of Arthur Sammler in Bellow’s controversial 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Bellow’s next work, Seize the Day (1956), too, engaged with history. Seize the Day was a shorter work, a tour-deforce novella about the strained relationship between a father and his ne’er-do-well son and the historical forces of 1950s America that keep them stuck in conflict with one another.

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Like many intellectuals of the time, Bellow was influenced by the popularity of Freud and psychoanalysis and transcendental movements, such as those led by Wilhelm Reich and Rudolph Steiner. Under the sway of these theorizers of the self, Bellow went on to write the experimental Henderson the Rain King (1959). Henderson details the adventures of a Hemingwayesque hero who travels to Africa to fi nd himself. Henderson’s encounters with an African tribe and a Western-educated Reichian African chief provide comic relief and philosophical speculation in equal measure. While Bellow was achieving success in his career during this period, his relationship with his wife, Anita, was experiencing unprecedented strain. Bellow was plagued by romantic trouble throughout his life; his novels and stories are fi lled with men and women who are either terribly unlucky in love or afraid to commit themselves. Bellow married four times after his marriage to Anita dissolved in 1953 and was famous for casting his dramatic relationships in print. Soon after he divorced Anita, he married Sondra Tschachasov, the model for the histrionic Madeleine in his later novel Herzog. His son Adam, from this fi rst marriage, was born in 1957. His marriage to Sondra soon foundered, and Bellow married the writer Susan Glassman, with whom he had his son, Daniel. Later, he shared a brief marriage with the Eastern European mathematician Alexandra Tulcea. He spent his last years married to his former student Janis Freedman, with whom he had a daughter Naomi in 2000, five years before his death. Throughout his life, Bellow looked to colleagues and literary friends for the stability and companionship he never received from wives and lovers. In New York, where Bellow moved for a time early in his career, the author tried to reignite old friendships and to meld with the Partisan Review circle, which included the editor Philip Rahv and the young future critical superstar Alfred Kazin. It was not, however, until he moved back to Chicago and began keeping company with the writer Richard Stern and his childhood friend Sam Freifeld that Bellow truly felt at home.

Bellow returned to Chicago after he experienced great success as a writer. Herzog marked a turning point in Bellow’s career. While he had some degree of renown before his 1964 novel, Herzog catapulted the middle-aged author into the pantheon of American literary stars. In 1965 Bellow was awarded the International Literary Prize for Herzog, becoming the first American to receive the prize. In January 1968, the Republic of France awarded him the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the highest literary distinction awarded by that nation to noncitizens. Later that year, he received an award from an organization that recalled his origins in Montreal’s Jewish neighborhood when he was given the B’nai B’rith Jewish Heritage Award for “excellence in Jewish literature.” Both Herzog and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) were awarded the National Book Award for fiction. Humboldt’s Gift (1975), a thinly veiled parable about the writer Delmore Schwartz and his experiences with artistry and madness, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1976, Bellow received the Nobel Prize in literature. In his oft-quoted acceptance speech, Bellow discussed his indebtedness to great modern authors, particularly Joseph Conrad, who dealt with what he called “the essence” of things, the large existential questions that weave through and motivate much of Bellow’s fiction, from the plight of the individual in a mass society to the painful split between body and mind. When Bellow was asked whether he thought he was awarded the Nobel Prize as a “Jewish writer” or an “American writer,” he replied that he thought he had been given the prize simply for being “a writer.” This discomfort with being defi ned as a Jewish writer is a theme that runs throughout Bellow’s work. In a letter to the writer Cynthia Ozick, Bellow acknowledged the ambivalence that Jewish writers of his generation felt when faced with their immigrant Jewish pasts. He admitted that he and his fellow post–World War II Jewish-American writers had been particularly uncomfortable when addressing the issue of Jewishness because of the association with the Holocaust that Jewishness carried in the postwar era. Bellow wondered: How could American Jewish authors write about the Holocaust without casting Jews as

Saul Bellow 37

eternal victims? How could Jewish-American writers compete in the world of high literature if they always had to be representative men, rather than individuals? While Bellow remained somewhat ambivalent about being described as a Jewish writer throughout his life, he increasingly engaged with explicitly Jewish themes in his fiction and analyzed how being Jewish had affected his own path as an author. Rather than mask the ethnic orientation of his hand-wringing intellectual antiheroes, as he did in his early work, the aged Bellow began to write autobiographical paeans to ambitious Jewish men not unlike him and the friends he had grown up with in Humboldt Park. In a speech he gave in 1970, he said: The American Jews, the Jewish writers, are descendants of immigrants of the first part of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they fell in love with English and American poetry and life. It was a love affair, there was nothing contrived about it. You went to school, you read these great books and poems, and you were just shot down by them. The question whether they had a right to this language and to this literature was a lively question. In their own eyes they sometimes felt that they didn’t have the right because they weren’t born to the manor, and American society—at least its elite Anglo-Saxon elements— told them that they didn’t come by it naturally and that it didn’t really belong to them. But the evidence of the streets was different, because a new life was forming in American society which belonged to nobody, and therefore there was no reason why an American writer should accept the words of Henry James in his book The American Scene, for instance, in which he was so distressed by the Jewish East Side of New York and by what was happening to the English language on the East Side. . . . That is what I did and this is what many others like me did. (“Saul Bellow on America and American Jewish Writers”)

Bellow’s meditations on both the anxiety that being Jewish evoked in many young writers and the power that resulted from the fact that “a new life was form-

ing in American society which belonged to nobody” are powerful ideas that echo in Bellow’s prose. Bellow is renowned for many aspects of his literary gift, most notably his facility with language and the spirit of play and the “street” that he gave to his fiction. The lack of fear that Bellow gathered from his childhood in an America far from the world of Henry James allowed him to become the ultimate literary Renaissance man. While Bellow is best known for his work as a novelist and short story writer, he also wrote a number of plays, including The Last Analysis and three short plays, collectively entitled Under the Weather, which were produced on Broadway in 1966. Bellow also wrote a number of works of criticism and creative nonfiction during his literary career. He published a compendium of his essays, It All Adds Up, in 1994. His criticism appeared in such renowned publications as the New York Times Book Review, Commentary, and the New Republic. After a raucous life filled with failed marriages and unparalleled literary success, Bellow died in 2005 at the age of 90.

“Looking for Mr. Green” (1951) “Looking for Mr. Green,” a short story Bellow published in Commentary magazine in 1951, tells the tale of George Grebe, an overeducated classics instructor who finds himself delivering relief checks during the depression. Grebe, the son of one of the last liveried butlers along Chicago’s wealthy Gold Coast, finds himself in reduced circumstances in Bellow’s celebrated story, forced to rely upon FDR’s WPA for a job during the economic downswing of the 1930s. Assigned to deliver checks to the poorest of the poor in Chicago’s black neighborhoods, Grebe is admonished by his cynical superior, Raynor, that he will experience difficulty locating the aid recipients because of their distrust for authority figures, particularly white authority figures. Armed with a briefcase full of youthful idealism and little else, Grebe fails at delivering relief checks but becomes obsessed with his inability to find a particular recipient, Tulliver Green, the “Mr. Green” of the story’s

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title. Grebe’s desperate search for this man becomes a nightmarish Virgilian tour through the poorest districts of Chicago and a metaphor for the experience of aimlessness and lack of purpose experienced by the many unemployed during the era. This short early piece foreshadows a number of the concerns Bellow explored in later works. Like Bernard Malamud, the Jewish-American author and relative contemporary with whom Bellow was most often linked, the Chicago-bred writer was deeply engaged with questions of race throughout his career. In “Looking for Mr. Green,” as in Malamud’s early short stories “Angel Levine” and “Black Is My Favorite Color,” Bellow manifests a belief in the possibility for profound interracial sympathy. George Grebe scorns the racist Italian grocer he meets during his relief rounds and experiences a moment of poignant identification with an elderly black relief recipient and war veteran. As Malamud’s was, Bellow’s perception of the possibility for interracial sympathy was strongly challenged by the Black Power movement in the late 1960s. His later works that deal with race relations, most notably the controversial Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), a novel roughly contemporaneous with Malamud’s dystopian The Tenants, depict a grotesque land of urban decay where black characters are representatives of violence and the primitive. The character of George Grebe prefigures, too, Bellow’s penchant for portraying down-on-theirluck intellectuals, who are unable to prosper in a culture where “the green,” money, rules. Most notably, Grebe could be likened to Bellow’s famously forlorn academic Moses Herzog, but he also resembles other Bellovian heroes, such as Humboldt von Fleischer, the Delmore Schwartzesque depressive of Humboldt’s Gift, and Ravelstein, the protagonist of Bellow’s last novel and a character closely based on the writer’s friend Professor Allan Bloom. The philosophical speculation and engagement with the great thinkers of the 20th century for which Bellow would become known fi nd early expression in “Looking for Mr. Green.” Particularly, Bellow creates lovely moments when the youthful Grebe pauses in his relief work to contemplate whether the poverty and degradation he sees are a part of the fleeting world of appearances or something more essen-

tial and immutable. Grebe’s conversations with his supervisor Raynor, in which he becomes a stand-in for the principles of idealism against Raynor’s jaded cynicism, often revolve around the question of whether the world, replete with poor relief recipients and dirty city streets, is a realm of appearance or reality. The introduction of the large and noisy Mrs. Staika and her five dirty-faced children into the relief offices makes ironic these casual interrogations of the nature of reality. Juxtaposing meditations on the abstract with the might of his concrete descriptions of the poor living in what he calls the “citywilderness” of depression era Chicago, “In Search of Mr. Green” proves an incomparable introduction to the early work of Saul Bellow.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “Looking for Mr. Green” is one of Saul Bellow’s most historically informed stories. The epigraph to Bellow’s story, “Whatsoever the hand fi ndeth to do, do it with all thy might,” has particular resonance in the era in which the search for Mr. Green takes place. Look up the history of the WPA in an encyclopedia or trustworthy online source and discuss the implications of George Grebe’s simultaneous search for Mr. Green and a purpose in life in Bellow’s 1951 story. What does Bellow suggest is the fate of the idealistic intellectual in a moneymaking society? 2. Saul Bellow’s interest in the possibility for sympathy between people of different races is a primary theme in “Looking for Mr. Green.” It is also a strong element of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Bellow’s 1970 novel set in New York City. How has Bellow’s attitude toward racial questions changed in this later work? How do racial questions become inscribed on the urban landscapes of Chicago and New York City in the detailed descriptive passages of these two works? 3. Invisibility is an important theme in “Looking for Mr. Green.” From the always-invisible Mr. Green to the many faceless aid recipients whom Grebe cannot begin to imagine, Bellow interweaves the idea of invisibility with race, poverty, and the death of the individual in society throughout his short story. How does Bellow’s use of the theme

Saul Bellow 39

of invisibility in this story compare to the use of invisibility by his friend and contemporary R ALPH ELLISON in the famous novel Invisible Man? 4. The conflict between the worlds of appearance and essence is played out in a number of ways in “Looking for Mr. Green.” This conflict is dramatized particularly in the characters of Mrs. Staika, the demanding relief recipient, and the naked black woman who appears as a proxy for Mr. Green in the last pages of the story. Using these characters, analyze the importance of the disjuncture between appearance and reality in Bellow’s imaginary universe. What do these two characters have in common? How do they support or undermine the philosophical questions introduced in Grebe’s conversations with his supervisor, Raynor? Why are both these characters women?

The Adventures of Augie March (1954) Bellow’s third novel was heralded as one of the most remarkable novels in the history of American letters. Moving from the staid prose and elegant formalism of Dangling Man and The Victim, Bellow composed The Adventures of Augie March as an exuberant ode to the wild world of his Chicago youth. While Bellow continued to be interested in literary modernism, The Adventures of Augie March was less interested in exploring the world of an alienated modern hero trapped in the absurdity of the modern city, as many modernist novels were, than in providing a rollicking and nostalgic romp through the world of the young rogue Augie and his family. Colorful characters and baroque, almost Dickensian, descriptions of places and people characterize this novel. Loosely based on Bellow’s early observations of his ragtag nextdoor neighbors in the working-class Chicago Jewish neighborhood in which he spent most of his childhood, The Adventures of Augie March tells the story of the March family, particularly brothers Augie and Simon March, and their fatherless clan. Their boarder and de facto matriarch Grandma Lausch, who rules over her adopted family with an iron fist and the help of her pet poodle, Winnie, dominates the Marches.

The plot of The Adventures of Augie March is a convoluted one. Bellow’s narration takes Augie from Chicago to Mexico and back on a series of realistic but enchanted adventures. Contrary to Bellow’s more plot-driven early novels and short stories, The Adventures of Augie March proves a chance for Bellow to demonstrate the power of his descriptive gifts. Augie’s neighborhood in Chicago is rendered in minute detail. Bellow seems to have memorized every lamppost and backyard plot in the area and given it a name. Influenced by French existentialist fiction, like that produced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March focuses on the power of the individual to shape his/her own life in a landscape otherwise devoid of meaning. Young Augie’s only allegiance is to his romantic ideas of the self, ideas that, Bellow insists, are eminently transportable, unlike the business ideals espoused by others in his neighborhood. Most strikingly, in The Adventures of Augie March Bellow abandons formal English for a playful and idiomatic Yiddish-inflected American English. The first lines of this novel are famous precisely because they herald Bellow’s embrace of an ordinary American literary voice. Bellow introduces Augie to the reader with the following words: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.” (1). In interviews, Bellow said that he had written his wild third novel with its uniquely American protagonist as a lark of sorts, an attempt to get away from his stilted and unfinished manuscript “The Crab and the Butterfly.” As does Heraclitus, the heroic figure invoked in the opening lines of The Adventures of Augie March, Augie embraces the idea that his fate is determined by character, rather than by biology or environment. Influenced by the Chicago immigrant milieu that Bellow depicts in his 1953 novel, the character-dictating-fate adage takes on added weight. Although

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set in the same depression era Chicago as “Looking for Mr. Green,” The Adventures of Augie March suggests that it is possible for a poor young boy to escape the bonds of his childhood into the wide world. Like George Grebe in “Looking for Mr. Green,” Augie is a man in search of his fate. In seeking a purpose in life, he tries out a series of ever-more-strange jobs, from dog groomer to smuggler and boxing coach, without ever realizing his dreams of being a teacher. Unlike Grebe’s, however, Augie’s tale is, for the most part, a hopeful one. Bellow sees his childhood Chicago through a nostalgic veil. Grandma Lausch, boss Einhorn, Five Properties, and Dingbat, some of the colorful characters who make up Augie’s world, are directly out of Bellow’s experience growing up in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. These characters’ every quirk becomes a part of the fairy tale landscape of the novel. Part of what is so subversive and powerful about Bellow’s work in The Adventures of Augie March results precisely from the fact that the reader is left without a clear idea of how to classify the novel. Is it a fairy tale, as some of the characters and plot points of the novel suggest, or an immigrant saga? In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow experimented with a number of literary forms, from the Bildungsroman (the coming-of-age novel) to the picaresque adventure tale. His combination of Yiddishisms and wild multiple noun and verb sentences with mythical and biblical allusions simultaneously locates Bellow within the pantheon of English literature and the life of the street he celebrates throughout his groundbreaking novel. In the end, however, the reader is left to question the success of Augie’s unquenchable quest for freedom. Bellow suggests that Augie’s desire for love, symbolized by his affair with Thea Fenchel, is not compatible with his driving refusal of commitment of any sort.

2.

3.

4.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The Adventures of Augie March is the first novel in which Saul Bellow attempts to provide his readers with a comprehensive idea of America and American life. As many critics have pointed out, the title

5.

of Bellow’s 1953 novel, as well as the playful hero Augie, call to mind the quintessentially American novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Why might Bellow have sought to invoke Mark Twain’s novel and the archetypal hero Huck in his depiction of an immigrant boy’s adventures? How does the historical period in which Bellow’s novel is written necessitate a revision of the Huckish protagonist’s adventures? How might we compare these novels? How does Bellow’s preoccupation with the manner in which American business culture structures the possibilities for the individual in American society emerge in The Adventures of Augie March? Using Bellow’s later novella, Seize the Day, discuss the way in which Bellow uses the relationships among family members to depict the choices available for youth in America during the time in which he was writing. How does Bellow write social conflicts onto familial relations in these two works? Augie is the ultimate proponent of freedom at all costs. Any attempts by a boss or love interest to pin him down send the young, prototypically American hero into flight. How does Augie prefigure a host of subsequent American literary heroes, most notably the highly eloquent and commitmentphobic heroes of PHILIP ROTH’s oeuvre, such as Nathan Zuckerman and Alexander Portnoy? Why might such a character be appealing to a postwar American literary audience? The confl ict between determinism and freedom is a central theme in The Adventures of Augie March from the first pages of the novel, when Bellow invokes the classical hero Heraclitus to emphasize young Augie’s insistence on avoiding being determined by his background. Why would this theme take on particular significance for an immigrant author? How does Bellow revise this common theme of myth by locating his story in an immigrant neighborhood in depression era Chicago? Many commentators have noted the muscular and vivacious prose style and narrative voice Bellow embraces in The Adventures of Augie March. How

Saul Bellow 41

does Bellow’s use of language affect our reading of the novel? How does it construct the tone of Augie’s adventures?

Seize the Day (1956) Although one of Bellow’s shorter works, Seize the Day is also one of his most ambitious. Written in an era in which business culture was king, and artists like Bellow were seen as the antidote to the crass consumerism of the masses, Seize the Day juxtaposes the high-minded idealism of art and the individual against the excesses of mass culture and the stock market. The story of the abject salesman Tommy Wilhelm that forms the crux of Seize the Day is Bellow’s take on the American myth of success. Much like Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Willie Loman in A RTHUR MILLER’s Death of a Salesman, Tommy Wilhelm is a figure whose complete trust in the American idea of economic success and cultural prestige sows the seeds of his destruction. Throughout Seize the Day, Bellow contrasts the sad but majestic individual, Tommy Wilhelm, against the crowd. Tommy is seen amid the rushing crowds of Midtown Manhattan and amid the successful elderly businessmen in his father’s apartment complex. Seize the Day is primarily the story of a successful father and the son whom he perceives as a failure in business and manhood. Tommy is the ultimate failure. He is unable to achieve success in marriage or as a father or, most particularly, as a son. Equally impressed by high-flying businessmen and the celebrity culture of Hollywood, Tommy is taken in by a series of con men. Basing it in part on an experience Bellow had as a youth, he provides a hilarious satire of America’s obsession with Hollywood when he depicts Tommy Wilhelm’s audition for a shady showbiz agent. Later in the novella, the pseudopsychologist and stock market speculator Tamkin, a father figure who manipulates the praise-seeking younger man, takes in Tommy. As in “Looking for Mr. Green” and Herzog, in Seize the Day Bellow reveals a preoccupation with larger philosophical questions, particularly the question of time and how it works. Seize the Day, with its

ironic invocation of the famous Latin phrase “Carpe diem,” takes place in one day. The day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm to which Bellow treats his readers stands in for all life, and the inevitable movement toward death that life carries. Seize the Day is filled with speculations about time. Tommy’s interest in the stock market is about the future and his desire to control it. His interest in psychology and the psychoanalyst Dr. Tamkin arises from his parallel desire to master the past, particularly the death of his mother, about which he feels unbearably guilty because of the nature of his activities on the day she died. So, too, Tommy Wilhelm’s relationship with his father is simultaneously about the past, his mother’s death, and the child’s (“Wilkie,” as his father patronizingly calls him) past failures, and about the future, his father’s impending death, and the old man’s overweening fear of it. As in David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), a book popular at the time Bellow wrote Seize the Day, the power of mass culture is seen to spell the end of the power of the individual in society. As society is ever more governed by the need for conformity, the individual’s every response becomes mechanized according to the tastes of the larger public. Seize the Day is Bellow’s ode to the abject man in the crowd.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In many ways, Seize the Day is a story about con men. Dr. Tamkin and the theatrical agent who promises Tommy Wilhelm a bright future as a second banana in pictures are the most obvious con men in the novella. But who else in Bellow’s work might be seen as untrustworthy? Can we trust Tommy as a narrator? Is his confession trustworthy? What might Bellow be attempting to say about American culture through his use of con men in this novella? 2. What part do mourning and death play in the novel? As Bellow makes clear throughout Seize the Day, both Tommy Wilhelm and his father are in arrested states of mourning and depression. How does Bellow construct the mournful tone of the novella? What do you make of the funeral scene at the end of Seize the Day and how might it be

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linked to Bellow’s choice to make his novella take place during the course of the day? 3. As mentioned, Bellow had an ambivalent relationship to Jewishness throughout his career. How does Jewishness play or not play a role in Seize the Day? How does the Holocaust maintain an offstage presence in this novella about the impossibility of properly mourning? 4. In Seize the Day, Bellow explores one of the themes that recur throughout his prose, the conflict between surfaces and depth, another way to render the clash between appearance and reality that George Grebe laments in “Looking for Mr. Green.” How does the role of secrets dramatize this conflict in Seize the Day? Why does everyone from the man doling out mail at the front desk to Tommy’s father have a secret? 5. Like David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, Seize the Day is deeply invested in the plight of the individual in mass culture. How might Reisman’s ideas apply to Bellow’s novella? How is Seize the Day a novel simultaneously about business culture and the death of the individual in society?

Herzog (1964) As Seize the Day does, Herzog focuses on a short time span in the life of a budding failure. Herzog, often viewed as the Bellow’s midcareer tour de force, tells the story of five days in the life of the narcissistic but silver-tongued intellectual Moses Herzog, a Jewish professor and writer of Bellow’s generation and a thinly veiled stand-in for the author himself. After his wife, Madeleine, leaves him for his best friend, the red-haired dandy Valentine Gersbach, Herzog descends into madness. In Bellow’s hands, however, Herzog remains lucid in his madness. Between visits to the ridiculous Freudian psychoanalyst Edvig, who also has his wife as a patient, Herzog writes letters to figures from Nietzsche to God, decrying the decay of society in a manner that recalls Spengler’s famous The Decline of Western Civilization, an early influence on Bellow. After having been dispossessed by his wife, Herzog retreats to Ludeyville, where he has a small

home in the Berkshire Mountains. Tormented by the filthy and disintegrating house, as well as visions of his wife’s infidelity and his best friend’s betrayal, Moses begins a letter-writing campaign unlike any seen before. While Herzog is primarily a comic novel, it contains many tragic elements and serious meditations on the need for Americans to return to a sense of morality and the social contract. In this novel, as in his earlier novella Seize the Day, Bellow engages with the sorry fate of the individual within the mass culture of the period. At the same time that Herzog is a story of the death of the subject, however, it is also a tale of the misadventures of a cuckolded husband. Modeled on Bellow’s own breakup with his second wife, Sondra, and his strained relationship with their child, Herzog is a wild satire that leaves none of its characters, least of all Herzog himself, unscathed. Perhaps it is for this reason that Herzog, Bellow’s most ambitious and intellectual work, was also his most popular, going on to become a best seller.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The epistolary style (novel in letter form) is central to Bellow’s construction of Herzog. Why does Bellow choose to evoke so much through the medium of the letter? What does it say that Bellow constructs an imaginary dialogue between his protagonist and a host of other characters to evoke the pain Herzog experiences as he laments the impossibility of true social connection in the alienated age in which he lives? 2. Throughout Bellow’s award-winning novel, the reader is left to question Moses Herzog’s sanity and trustworthiness as a narrator. We see the events of Herzog’s marriage unfold through his eyes alone. Is Moses mad? How is the theme of madness developed in Herzog? How does Bellow’s critique of psychoanalysis structure his 1964 novel? 3. When Herzog retires to his house in the Berkshires, he obsesses over the events surrounding his wife’s affair with his best friend. As in “Looking for Mr. Green,” Herzog focuses upon the possibility of discerning the truth beneath the world of appearances that composes modernity. Does

Saul Bellow 43

Herzog ever discover the real details of the affair? How does Herzog’s pursuit of the details of his wife’s affair through interviewing his friends and reviewing his own memories say more about him than about his wife? How does Bellow deal with the theme of realities versus appearances in this novel? 4. Herzog has been described as one of the masterpieces of 20th-century American satire. Look up the definition of satire in a literary encyclopedia or trustworthy Internet source and outline the principles of the genre. What is Bellow attempting to satirize in Herzog? How does he make it clear from the first pages of his novel that he is attempting to parody his characters and themes, even as he develops them? How might the use of satire and parody be Bellow’s attempt to write a novel against the tradition of modernist solemnity that he espoused in his early works?

Humboldt’s Gift (1975) Published the year before he would receive the coveted Nobel Prize in literature, Humboldt’s Gift is a masterwork on a smaller scale than Herzog. Where Herzog gives the reader a tour through much of 20th-century philosophy with the hysterical academic Moses Herzog as guide, Humboldt’s Gift tells the sad, but comical, tale of foils Charlie Citrine and Humboldt von Fleischer. Humboldt was modeled on the writer Delmore Schwartz, an artist touted as the great new hope of modern poetry in the 1950s, only to die at a young age after a struggle with mental illness and substance abuse. At the beginning of Bellow’s 1975 novel, Citrine is himself a middling poet, who wastes his time pursuing troubled women and the excitement of petty crime. Gradually, however, Citrine becomes Bellow’s eyes and ears. He sets his penetrating gaze on the failing poet Humboldt and narrates a pitch-perfect tale of the great man’s decline that becomes a meditation on the failure of modern society to support artistic genius. All the ideals of modern society, from the science-minded surveys of Kinsey and Gallup to the alienating structures of capitalism and the theories of Freud, combine

to subvert Humboldt’s gift, according to Citrine. Humboldt’s descent into madness, which Citrine gorgeously and comically narrates in Humboldt’s Gift, is a metaphor for the larger social decline that he observes in the 20th century. The 60-year-old Citrine begins to realize that he must leave his home in Chicago and begin a quest for spiritual fulfillment, far from the maddening world that felled Humboldt. In the last pages of the novel, Humboldt sees crocuses pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk and has a moment of awakening, an “epiphanic” moment in which he begins to see the beauty in the world around him and a means of avoiding the sad fate of the sensitive artist in the cold modern world.

For Discussion or Writing 1. At the time that Bellow wrote Humboldt’s Gift, he was undergoing his own transformation, coming under the sway of the mystical school of anthroposophy founded by Rudolph Steiner. Consult an encyclopedia or trustworthy Internet site and learn about anthroposophy. How do such transcendental schools of thought and theories of essential self play a part in Humboldt’s Gift? If you are also familiar with some of Freud’s ideas, do you see Bellow commenting on those ideas in the novel? Why or why not? 2. As many readers of the time knew, Humboldt von Fleischer was a thinly veiled stand-in for the poet Delmore Schwartz. Look up Delmore Schwartz in a literary encyclopedia and look at his famous first work, In Dreams Come Responsibilities. Why was he such an emblematic author for writers of Bellow’s generation? How does his character shine a light on the failures of society in Humboldt’s Gift? 3. Again, in 1975’s Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow focuses on the subject of madness, this time through Humboldt’s struggle with manic depression. How does madness work in this novel? How is it employed differently here than in Herzog, Bellow’s other great novel of madness? 4. Gender plays an important role in Humboldt’s Gift, as it does elsewhere in Bellow’s oeuvre. Compare the portrayal of masculinity in this novel and in

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the earlier works Seize the Day and “Looking for Mr. Green.” What might Bellow be trying to say about the power of masculine ideals in American society in these works?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON BELLOW AND HIS WORK 1. Ernest Hemingway was one of the most imitated prose stylists in American letters during the era in which Saul Bellow came of age. Many writers aspired to mimic Hemingway’s spare writing style, aloof tone, and hypermasculine protagonists. In contrast to Hemingway, Bellow writes highly descriptive and emotional prose. His novels and stories are short on plot. His heroes are antiheroic to the extreme. Moses Herzog and Augie March can hardly be mentioned in the same breath as Jake Barnes and Nick Adams, two of Hemingway’s most famous protagonists. Was Bellow’s rejection of the Hemingwayesque writing style and male protagonist a means of rejecting the particular modernism the elder author espoused? Or was Bellow’s trajectory away from Hemingway a response to the interpretation of American masculinity he offered? To answer this question, you may want to consult an encyclopedia or trustworthy Internet sites to learn more about “literary modernism” and Ernest Hemingway’s works. 2. Saul Bellow’s relationship to Jewishness was complex. Having grown up in a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family and inhabited a Jewish intellectual milieu throughout much of his life, he eschewed explicit identification with Jewishness in much of his work. Nonetheless, he expressed an increasing interest in Jewishness and Judaism as he grew older, choosing the curmudgeonly Holocaust survivor Arthur Sammler to be the mouthpiece for his critique of the decline of America in 1970 novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet and writing frequent pieces about his Jewish childhood and experiences as a Jewish writer in America. How might we trace the trajectory of Bellow’s relationship to

Jewishness through his prose? How might the shift in his identification with Jewishness during the 1960s be seen as a reaction to the changing ethnic and political landscape of the United States? 3. Bellow had close friendships with a number of neoconservatives, most notably the famous academic Allan Bloom. Although Bellow always kept one foot out of political debates, he increasingly drew fire for making racist comments about the possibilities for African art in the New York Times and writing the foreword to Bloom’s controversial polemic about the perils of the culture wars, The Closing of the American Mind. Is it appropriate to evaluate Bellow’s work alongside his sporadic commitments to neoconservatism? How much should an author’s politics be allowed to intrude into the way we read his prose? 4. One of Bellow’s recurring themes is the waning place for the artist and intellectual in American society. What sort of critiques of American culture, particularly business ideology, can we find in Bellow’s fiction? Does his perception about the role of the artist and intellectual change in his later work? How can we read Bellow beside literary contemporaries who overtly questioned American culture, such as Arthur Miller? Was Bellow’s commitment to philosophy and the great thinkers such as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in works such as Herzog intended as a critique of the prevailing culture of philistinism he perceived in American society? WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Atlas, James. Bellow. New York: Random House, 2000. Bach, Gerhard, and Gloria L. Cronin, eds. Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. Bach, Gerhard, and Jakob J. Köllhofer, eds. Saul Bellow at Seventy-Five: A Collection of Critical Essays. Tübingen: G. Narr, 1991. Bellow, Saul. “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.” Nobelprize.org. Available online. URL: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/ bellow-lecture.html. Accessed May 28, 2007.

Saul Bellow 45

———. “Saul Bellow on America and American Jewish Writers.” Congress Bi-Weekly. December 4, 1970. Available online. URL: http://www.nextbook. org/cultural/feature.html?id=94. Accessed May 28, 2007. Bigler, Walter. Figures of Madness in Saul Bellow’s Longer Fiction. Bern: Peter Lang, 1998. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. Foreword by Saul Bellow. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Bloom, Harold, ed. Saul Bellow. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brahm, Jeanne. A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow’s Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Cronin, Gloria. A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Cronin, Gloria L., and L. H. Goldman, eds. Saul Bellow in the 1980s: A Collection of Critical Essays. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989. Cronin, Gloria L., and Ben Siegel, eds. Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Eichelberger, Julia. Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Goldman, L. H. Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience. New York: Irvington, 1983. Harris, Mark. Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Hyland, Peter. Saul Bellow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Kramer, Michael, ed. New Essays on Seize the Day. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. “Literature 1976.” Nobelprize.org. Available online. URL: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/index.html. Accessed May 28, 2007. Newman, Judie. Saul Bellow and History. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. The Official Saul Bellow Society Web site. Available online. URL: http://www.saulbellow.org/NavigationBar/TheLibrary.html#augiemarch. Accessed March 25, 2009. Pifer, Ellen. Saul Bellow against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Rosenfeld, Isaac. Preserving the Hunger: An Isaac Rosenfeld Reader. Edited and introduced by Mark Shechner, foreword by Saul Bellow. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. Roth, Philip. Shoptalk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Sicher, Ephraim. Holocaust Novelists. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Trachtenberg, Stanley. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Wasserman, Harriet. Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow: A Memoir. New York: Fromm International, 1997. Weber, Donald. Haunted in the New World: Jewish American Culture from Cahan to the Goldbergs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Wilson, Jonathan. Herzog: The Limits of Ideas. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Jennifer Glaser

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? (“Questions of Travel”)

B

orn in Worcester, Massachusetts, Elizabeth Bishop died in Boston, a little over 50 miles from the town where she began her life. However, the relative proximity of these two locations belies the fact that Bishop was, in fact, a wanderer, a traveler, an explorer. In truth, her whole life is fi lled with such contradictions. Seeking a secure and stable home, Bishop was almost always displaced, in motion. Given to deep introspection, she loathed the confessional or indulgent in her own writing; working in a literary/auditory medium, she possessed a painterly eye, and many of her poems are conspicuously visual; striving to complete poems that were as close to fact as memory permitted, she often used reality as a springboard to the fantastic. Though in her later years Bishop focused intently on her childhood, we have relatively few objective accounts of it. Most information is found either in her recollections in letters, her autobiographical stories, or her poetry. We do know that Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, to William Thomas Bishop and Gertrude Bulmer Bishop, both of Canadian ancestry. William Bishop was a prominent, well-educated builder from a prosperous middle-class family. According to letters from her father announcing her birth, Elizabeth was a welcome addition to a loving home. Nevertheless,

this happiness was short lived. William Bishop died of Bright’s disease (a general catch-all diagnosis in the early 1900s for any sort of kidney-related disease) when Elizabeth was only eight months old. The reality of the loss, however, goes much deeper than Thomas Bishop’s death. While Elizabeth was obviously deprived of her father from a young age, she lost both parents with his passing. Whether her mother was mentally unstable before her husband’s death is not certain, but she suffered a mental breakdown after it and never fully recovered. As a result, Gertrude Bulmer Bishop was only a shadow in young Elizabeth’s life, and though she lived until 1934, the majority of her life was spent in institutions, and she never was able to care for her daughter. With her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent breakdown, Elizabeth returned with her mother to live in Great Village, Nova Scotia, with the Bulmers. The time spent as a young girl under the care of her grandparents heavily influenced Bishop’s writing. Because of her mother’s frequent hospitalizations, Elizabeth saw herself essentially as an orphan in an isolated, tight-knit community, a “guest,” attended to by older relatives; Great Village later represented for her an idealized childhood and the strong family connections that she attempted to recreate throughout her life. One of

46

Elizabeth Bishop 47

the most direct accounts of Bishop’s impressions of that period appears in her short story “In the Village” (Collected Prose 251–274). Set against the pastoral backdrop of the comforting, peaceful village and told from a child’s perspective, the story details a mother’s release from a mental institution and her subsequent return to it at the story’s end. The story emphasizes the child’s fears and uncertainty about her mother’s intrusive presence through two primary opposing symbols: the beautiful, rhythmic clang of a hammer against a blacksmith’s anvil (life in the village) and the unsettling dread contained in a woman’s scream (her mother). Life in Great Village also stirred in Bishop a love for nature and the outdoors, although she suffered from numerous lung-related infections and was prone to long bouts of bronchitis. As a result, formal education was difficult. Whatever stability Bishop might have known as a child was overturned after her mother’s fi nal hospitalization in 1916, when Elizabeth was forcibly removed from Great Village by her paternal grandparents to live with them in Worcester, Mass. Though well intentioned in their desire to see her raised in the best that they could afford her, Bishop never fully overcame the shock and loss of the life in Great Village. While she lived with her father’s parents for less than a year, it marked her deeply. She recounted this sense of displacement in her memoir “The Country Mouse” (Collected Prose 13–34). In Worcester, she truly was isolated—assigned formal playmates chosen by her grandmother, raised by servants. Here she began to evidence the debilitating and chronic asthma that plagued her throughout her adult life. In 1918 Bishop’s mother’s eldest sister, Maude, liberated young Elizabeth from her grandparents’ household. By all accounts, they were forced to concede she was miserable with them and allowed Maude to take Elizabeth to see whether she could do better. While conditions in Maude’s home were certainly not “privileged” in any respect, Bishop was always indebted to her aunt Maude’s generosity and expressed deep affection for her. She also credited Maude’s love of literature and her “teem-

ing bookshelves” as early influences for her writing. Under Maude’s care, Elizabeth blossomed, winning her fi rst recognition (a five-dollar gold piece) as a writer at age 12 for an essay on Americanism. She was also able to reunite with her Bulmer grandparents, returning summers to Great Village to spend time with them. Her father’s family maintained a strong, active presence in her life; a generous bequest from her father’s estate fi nanced her formal education, fi rst at Walnut Hill School for Girls and later at Vassar, where she graduated in 1934. Apart from completing college, 1934 was a pivotal year in Bishop’s life: Her mother died and Bishop was introduced to Marianne Moore. A fellow alumna of Vassar, Moore was a graduate of the famous class of 1933, which served as background for Mary McCarthy’s autobiographical novel The Group. Moore and Bishop shared a love for animals and nature, with a strong penchant toward the unusual, and their fi rst outing together was to the circus to see the animals and feed the elephants. Animals play an important role throughout many of Bishop’s poems including poems titled after their subject, such as “The Rooster,” “The Armadillo,” and “The Moose.” Animal symbolism figures prominently also in poems such as “At the Fishhouses,” where a playful seal works as a means of revelation. Moore also encouraged Bishop greatly in her efforts toward a career as a poet, serving as a mentor and sponsor. In her memoir, “Efforts of Affection,” Bishop indicates that Moore’s influence left her “inspired, determined to be good, to work harder . . . never to try to publish anything until I thought I’d done my best with it” (Complete Prose 137). Like Moore, Bishop was meticulous in the execution of her work, often taking decades to produce a fi nished poem. Unlike Moore, however, she was reticent to present herself to the public, and it was not until her later years that she followed Moore’s pattern of writing, teaching, and giving public readings; however, this course seems to have resulted more from fi nancial necessity than from desire. Under Moore’s patronage, Bishop’s fi rst

48 Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

poems were published in 1935 in Trial Balances, an anthology of new poets introduced by more established writers. From 1935 to 1945, Bishop lived primarily in Key West and New York and traveled extensively through Europe, Mexico, and Morocco. Her companion and lover for a majority of this time was Louise Crane, another friend from her Vassar years. Unlike Bishop, who had limited fi nancial resources, Crane came from a wealthy background and attracted many bright and influential people from the worlds of art, literature, and music into her circle. Through Louise Crane, Bishop met Billie Holliday, her inspiration for the poem “Songs for a Colored Singer.” Crane also introduced Bishop to the woman who would later provide the most significant personal relationship in her life—Lota de Macedo Soares. Bishop kept extensive journals of her travels from this time, working and publishing poems primarily in the New Yorker and the Partisan Review. Key West gave Bishop a setting for a number of notable poems, including “The Fish” and “The Bight.” The house where she lived with Louise Crane in Key West became the fi rst of the “three loved houses” in “One Art.” However, her health still caused problems, primarily due to her asthma and an ever-increasing dependence on alcohol In 1946 Bishop was selected to receive the Houghton Miffl in Literary Fellowship for her manuscript North and South. Bishop had received a recommendation for the award from Marianne Moore, and the honor carried with it a cash prize of $1,000 and publication of her book of poems. North and South was greeted with great acclaim and established Bishop as a major new American poet. Some of her best-known works including “The Man-Moth,” “The Fish,” “Florida,” and “The Map” appear here. Apart from the acclaim, an additional benefit Bishop received from the publication of North and South was that it called her to the attention of her fellow poet the literary critic R ANDALL JARRELL , who reviewed the book. Jarrell introduced Bishop to her second important mentor and friend, ROBERT L OWELL. Whereas Marianne Moore had

influenced Bishop in the way she approached her poetry, Lowell was a much more practical mentor. He helped Bishop understand how to obtain fi nancing through fellowships and grants so that she could continue her work; she was awarded her fi rst Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. Because her family’s legacy was limited, Bishop learned to rely on these monies to support her, and when they proved insufficient in her later years, she turned to teaching. Lowell helped Bishop secure and persuaded her to accept the position of consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1951, a precursor to today’s poet laureate consultant in poetry. After her time in this position, Bishop received the fi rst Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellowship in Poetry from Bryn Mawr College. Using this money, Bishop fulfi lled a lifelong desire to travel to South America with plans to sail up the Amazon. When she fell ill in Rio de Janeiro after eating the fruit of a cashew tree, she was nursed back to health by one of the acquaintances she was visiting, Lota de Macedo Soares. However, when Bishop was well enough to resume travel, Soares declared her love for Bishop, asking her to stay, promising to build her a writing studio in the home she was constructing north of Rio in the Brazilian countryside. Bishop later wrote of Soares’s offer, “It just meant everything to me.” Bishop lived with Soares from 1952 until 1967, moving fi rst into Soares’s home in Samambaia and later into a home Bishop purchased in Ouro Preto, Brazil. As did the residence in Key West that she shared with Louise Crane, the homes she shared with Lota de Macedo Soares would also figure in her poem “One Art” as the second and third of her “three loved houses.” With the stability and love Soares provided, Bishop entered into one of the most happy and productive periods of her life. Bishop loved Brazil—not only for the beauty of the country, but also for the warmth and generosity of the people. The freedom she enjoyed with Soares allowed her to explore new themes and forms in her work. She began to incorporate childhood memories, and she published her autobiographical short story “In the Village” in the New Yorker in 1953. She also

Elizabeth Bishop 49

learned Portuguese well enough to translate The Diary of Helena Morley, a classic Brazilian memoir of a 12-year-old girl from a rural mining village, published in 1957. Helena Morley was a personal favorite for Bishop, who identified strongly with the story of the young heroine’s isolation and resilience; unfortunately, the book did not enjoy commercial success. Conversely, a joint effort with the editors of Life magazine, where she provided the text for a pictorial book, Brazil, published in 1962, was extremely lucrative for Bishop, but artistically unsatisfying. Her most important work of this period occurred in 1955, when Bishop submitted her second book of poems, A Cold Spring, for publication. When the publisher feared that the 20 new poems were insufficient material for a whole volume, Bishop suggested that they be included with a reissue of North & South. The new work, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring, included such notable poems as “At the Fishhouses,” “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” and “The Bight.” The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1956. Though Bishop was happy in her personal life with Soares, political strife in Brazil drove a wedge between them. Empowered by the newly elected governor of the region, Soares became consumed with efforts to reclaim a large section of land (roughly the size of New York’s Central Park) and build a “people’s park.” When the opposing parties in the government met her efforts with resistance, Soares turned her attention from Bishop to focus more fully on her project. However, the failed effort to construct the park ultimately undermined her health as well as straining her relationship with Bishop, who turned (as was her custom) to alcohol for relief in times of stress. Bishop received a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in 1964 and published her third book of poems, Questions of Travel, in 1965. This was not sufficient, however, to relieve the fi nancial stress that Soares had placed on them. Because Soares had depleted most of their savings in her efforts to build the people’s park, Bishop decided to accept a teaching offer from the University of

Washington in 1966. Soares refused to accompany her to the United States, and when Bishop returned after two semesters as writer in residence, their troubles worsened. Soares was diagnosed with arteriosclerosis and her health deteriorated rapidly, forcing her to resign as head of the park project. Bishop’s health was also fragile, and her heavy drinking only contributed to the problems. Doctors recommended a separation for the two, hoping it would allow Soares to recover. However, when Bishop returned to New York, Soares followed shortly thereafter and on her fi rst night with Bishop in the United Stage took a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. Devastated, Bishop tried to resume life in Brazil, though she was treated badly by former friends and relations there, who held her partially responsible for Soares’s death. While she did not publish new work during this time, her next book, a collection entitled The Complete Poems, appeared in 1969 and was awarded the National Book Award for poetry. Recognizing that life in Brazil without Soares was impossible, Bishop moved back to Boston, where she settled permanently. She also began to teach at Harvard, invited by Robert Lowell to teach his courses while he was on leave in England. Brazil still figured prominently in her work, however, and after years of struggle to overcome her grief, in 1976 Bishop produced her fi nal volume of original poetry, Geography III. The book combines much of what is distinctly Bishop—precise description, dreamlike visions, and childhood revelations. Containing some of Bishop’s most well known poems, “The Moose,” “In the Waiting Room,” “One Art,” and “Crusoe in England,” the book was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is dedicated to Alice Methfessel, whom Bishop met after moving to Boston, and who became the fi nal important love relationship in her life. That same year Bishop became the fi rst American and the fi rst woman to receive the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Though she expressed a strong desire to retire, fi nances would not allow her to, and Bishop continued to teach and give public readings of her poetry until her sudden death of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1979. She was

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buried in Worcester, her gravestone inscribed with words she chose for her epitaph, the fi nal lines from her poem “The Bight”: “All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful” (Complete Poems 61).

“The Man-Moth” (1936) “The Man-Moth” is a fantastical tale of a mysterious underground creature seeking the Moon, troubled by dreams, riding backward on the subway through the night. He is part loner, part urban dweller, but in many ways he is a representation of the artist, whose vision and self-sacrifice provide the basis for the regeneration of others. Said to be inspired by a newspaper misprint of the word mammoth, the poem also uses details taken from Bishop’s journal notes while living in New York City. The world of “The Man-Moth” is a world of shadow, similar to the setting of “The Weed,” where everything happens at night, in the darkness. The poem concerns two main beings: Man lives above the Earth but cannot see the Moon, aware only of the light cast by it, his shadow, “only as big as his hat” (line 2); Man-Moth emerges from his home underground to investigate the Moon, “a small hole at the top of the sky” (line 14). As does Harold Lloyd, clambering up the side of a building in the silent fi lm Safety Last, the Man-Moth scales the skyscrapers of the city in an effort to push his head through the “pinhole” in the sky into the light beyond. Watching from below, Man knows this effort is impossible; Bishop tells us “he has no such illusions” (line 22). However, “what the ManMoth fears most he must do” (line 23). Though the Man-Moth’s quest is futile, Bishop does not present the lonely creature as an object of ridicule. Indeed, the journey is described in cyclical terms: This happens each time, and the Man-Moth continues in the persistent belief that each time he will succeed. When the Man-Moth returns to the underground, he boards a subway train, “facing the wrong way / and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed, / without a shift in gears or a

gradation of any sort. / He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards” (line 29–32). If we look at Bishop’s own life and her progression as an artist, the poem is eerily prescient. Bishop knows the artist always travels looking backward; however, for her, experience and memory do not provide refuge, but troubled visions instead. In the same manner, “Each night [the Man-Moth] must / be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams” (lines 33–34). It is sad that, there is no destination for the creature—or for the artist; instead, implies Bishop, both are always in motion, and even in rest, there is no satisfaction. Though the idea of death, and permanent rest, is appealing as the Man-Moth rides backward through the night, in the “pale subways of cement he calls home” (line 20), he understands “he does not dare look out the window, / for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison / runs there beside him” (lines 36–38). Death, or more accurately suicide, even though it offers a chance of escape, is seen as an indulgence. Bishop tells us the Man-Moth “regards it as a disease / he has inherited the susceptibility to” (lines 38–39). In the fi nal stanza of the poem as we encounter the Man-Moth directly, Bishop reveals her view of the value of the artist: “If you catch him; / hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil, / an entire night itself” (lines 41–43). As a reward for this contact, the Man-Moth offers up the only thing he has to give: “one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting” (line 45). But, says Bishop, the gift is not offered easily: “If you’re not paying attention / he’ll swallow it” (lines 46–47). For Bishop as an artist, the willingness to offer up her “eye,” the pain associated with truth, would much more easily be swallowed. She may offer her artistic vision of the world to others in the same manner the ManMoth reluctantly offers the tear, but contained in the offering is water, “cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink” (line 48).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Bishop’s poem “The Weed.” As you read it, what comparisons can you make to ideas in

Elizabeth Bishop 51

“The Man-Moth”? How does Bishop attempt to defi ne herself as an artist in both poems? 2. Bishop introduces the third rail of the subway track, the electric rail that runs above the regular track, as a symbol of death. But just as the third rail of the subway is deadly to anyone who might touch it, it also provides power to propel the train. How does the idea of death “energize” the artist? 3. The tear that the Man-Moth offers to anyone willing to hold a light up to his eye seems to have regenerative powers. Why do you think that Bishop shifts from a third-person view in the poem to second person at this moment? How does this work in with the idea of the ManMoth as a representation of Bishop’s poetry or art in general?

“The Unbeliever” (1938) Though Bishop was not religious, certainly not Christian in any traditional sense, she was grounded in Christian theology, and Christian symbols and themes populate much of her work. In “The Unbeliever,” Bishop addresses no-belief as a belief system but also suggests that faith itself is little more than willed ignorance. Beginning the poem with a reference to the quintessential Puritan handbook, Pilgrim’s Progress, Bishop’s Unbeliever sleeps atop a mast above the sea. He knows that his perch is precarious, dangerous, but he chooses to keep “his eyes fast closed” (line 2). Contrasting the Unbeliever’s fear and desire to stay asleep, Bishop introduces two alternate points of view, illustrating how sight and perception are related to belief. First, we hear from a cloud that imagines that he is founded on marble pillars and never moves. Looking down into the sea, he has all the justification for his beliefs that he needs: “Secure in introspection, he peers at the watery pillars of his own reflection” (lines 14–15). Next a gull supposes that the air itself is “like marble” (line 18) and that he will forever be buoyed

by “marble wings on my tower-top fly” (line 20). If the cloud envisions a world where he never moves, the gull sees the world as unceasing movement toward heaven. What links the two disparate points of view is the fact that they are so obviously misguided but that they believe what they believe absolutely. In the last stanza of the poem the gull reads the dream of the Unbeliever: “ ‘I must not fall. / The spangled sea below wants me to fall. / It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all” (lines 23–25). Though the Unbeliever is mistaken that the sea is hard as diamonds in the same way the cloud thinks he is perched atop a marble pillar or that the gull thinks his wings are marble, the Unbeliever is correct in his fears—the sea poses the threat of death and destruction. “The Unbeliever” is unusual for Bishop, in that she never injects herself into the poem. Unlike “The Man-Moth,” where we can discern Bishop’s admiration for and identification with the Man-Moth, in this poem she chooses to give each point of view his own speech, clearly identifying each perspective, but not claiming one for herself. Though the Unbeliever is not a source of ridicule or disdain as are the arrogant, foolish cloud and gull, neither is he a source of inspiration. His choice paralyzes him; though he may have more true knowledge than the other voices in the poem, his knowledge does nothing to liberate or rejuvenate him.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Like “The Unbeliever,” Pilgrim’s Progress, written by John Bunyan, is told in the form of a dream where Christian seeks his salvation on a pilgrimage to heaven. Along his journey, he encounters many obstacles that test his faith as well as many characters who are useful in showing him the difference between right and wrong. Why do you think Bishop uses a reference to this overtly Christian text to begin her poem? How can some of the images such as “marble towers” work to identify the cloud or the gull with Christianity? Is the identification complimentary or derogatory?

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2. In his book on Elizabeth Bishop titled The Unbeliever, Robert Dale Parker says that the poem consciously evokes Ishmael in Moby-Dick (33). In Melville’s story, Ishmael recounts the dull, almost hypnotic chore of sitting atop the mast to scan the sea in search of whales. Because of the extreme height and the instability of the perch, Ishmael warns that it is not a good job for an introspective, reflective man, who might lose himself in his thoughts and possibly fall to his death. How does this idea of introspection as danger work into themes expressed in “The Unbeliever”? 3. Read “A Pit—but Heaven over It” by Emily Dickinson. Compare the ideas expressed by Dickinson to those by Bishop. What similarities are there? Where do they differ?

“The Fish” (1940) Shortly after moving to Key West, Bishop discovered her love for fishing, and her notes from this period detail an outing when she landed a 60-pound amberjack. The excursion, which provides the basis for “The Fish,” is more than just a fish tale of “the one that got away,” however. When T. S. Eliot fi rst spoke of the “objective correlative,” he used the term to explain the foundation by which artists use a given external situation, experience, or object to produce an emotion that is otherwise inexplicable; as the description of the sensory experience ends, the emotional response to it commences. “The Fish,” as do other poems that appeared in North and South including “Florida” and “The Weed,” uses description of a particular event, place, or object to produce just such an emotional response. Unlike “Florida,” however, where the description of the place is more contained and less symbolic, or “The Weed,” where the representation is more obvious—“In that black place, thought I saw / that each drop contained a light, / a small, illuminated scene” (Complete Poems 21)—“The Fish” marks a step forward for Bishop. In this poem she not only uses her keen eye for detail, but also shows that she “sees” what is not directly observable: “I thought of

the coarse white flesh / packed in like feathers, / the big bones and the little bones, / the dramatic reds and blacks / of his shiny entrails” (lines 27–31). As Carol Frost notes in “Elizabeth Bishop’s Inner Eye,” “What else is at work concerns . . . the inner eye’s power to generate, focus, manipulate, and enhance visual images in the mind, and the poem shows the future of that power” (250–251). Inserting herself into the poem through a fi rstperson narrative point of view, Bishop moves from impartial direct observation to internal speculation and identification as she describes “his gills . . . breathing in / the terrible oxygen /—the frightening gills, / fresh and crisp with blood” (lines 22–25). In the same manner that observation leads to identification, close description of the image and events leads to transformation. In the fi nal part of the poem, as “victory fi ll[s] up / the little rented boat” (lines 66–67), the fish becomes a metaphor of survival, suggesting the poet herself may overcome adversity. In this way, Bishop suggests that the act of observing and detailing, the act of creating art from experience, sets in motion deeper levels of change and new ways of being.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In her poem “Poetry,” Marianne Moore says that in reading a good poem, “One discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine. / Hands that can grasp, eyes / that can dilate, hair that can rise. . . ” She also exhorts poets, saying, “nor till the poets among us can be / ‘literalists of the imagination’—above insolence and triviality and can present / for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ shall we have / it.” What does Moore mean when she says that poets must be “literalists of the imagination”? How does “The Fish” work in respect to this idea? Has Bishop created an “imaginary garden with a real toad” in her description of the fish where readers can discover a place for the genuine? How so? 2. In what ways is Bishop’s real fish anthropomorphic? How does she use feminine images to complement or contrast the description of the fish?

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3. Bishop delighted in telling friends that the poem was as close to the actual event as she could make it, changing only the number of hooks and lines in the fish’s mouth from three to five. But the poem is much more than a mere recounting of a fishing trip. How does the poem differ from a straightforward prose rendition of the event? How does Eliot’s “objective correlative” apply to the poem? 4. As an imagist, Bishop used many of the same techniques as poets such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Read Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro,” and/or Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Why do the poets focus on a single image or item? How does description in these poems work to help us understand larger concepts?

“At the Fishhouses” (1948) “At the Fishhouses” fi rst appeared in the August 9, 1948, issue of the New Yorker, a product of notes Bishop made while traveling in Nova Scotia the previous summer. The poem not only marks a return to Bishop’s homeland as a place for material, but also points to her interest in studying herself in relation to the landscape and the people who inhabit it with her. In his literary biography, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, Brett Millier proposes the poem marks a shift in Bishop, moving from observer (as evidenced in earlier poems such as “The Map,” published a decade earlier) to geographer, a role that requires a more informed and intimate contact with the landscape. She labels her notes for the poem “GM,” which Millier tells us has been suggested as “Geographical Mirror” and was “part of [Bishop’s] attempt to fi nd herself in land and sea” (182). Indeed, Bishop describes the coastal setting in terms of a mirror, early on: “All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering spilling over” (lines 13–14). Nova Scotia had been home to her mother’s family, and Bishop explored the connection to fam-

ily in the poem. The narrator meets an old man who “was a friend of my grandfather” (line 33). Together, as they sit talking in the cold light at the edge of the sea, Bishop paints a Wyethesque landscape, her emphasis on the painterly visuals; she highlights such items as the rusted ironwork, decaying fish, lobster pots covered in a shining fi lm of scales to show how time has weathered the village. While the “steeply peaked roofs” of the houses attempt to oppose the eroding effects of time, its deteriorating effects seem nonetheless inevitable. The narrator and the old man talk about “the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring” (lines 34–35). Bishop not only focuses on the landscape around her, but also considers that which cannot be seen, which remains hidden beneath the sea. In the fi nal lines, Bishop also confi rms another aspect of her “geographical” inspection—not only does time destroy: Flux is inevitable, all around us, putting us inside history, “our knowledge . . . historical, flowing, and flown” (line 84). In the second half of the poem, Bishop shifts her attention to a friendly, familiar seal playing in the water just offshore as she has seen him do before. Bishop notes her religious background and makes a strong connection with the seal, saying, “like me a believer in total immersion, / so I used to sing him Baptist hymns” (line 53—54). Though the reference to hymn singing displays Bishop’s self-professed love of hymns, Bishop does not appear interested in immersion in the religious sense. Her desire is to be immersed in experience, the constant flow, just as the seal dives into the icy water, “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear” (63). For Bishop, the water beneath the surface is cold: “your wrist would ache immediately, / your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn / as if the water were a transmutation of fi re (lines 73–75). It is a source of truth and nourishment: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free” (lines 79–80). Whereas a mapmaker is concerned with relationships of objects in relation to one another, the geographer looks at the texture of landscape

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in its totality. With “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop moves into the emotional landscape of her own life experience.

For Discussion or Writing 1. During her life Bishop expressed great admiration for and a fascination with the writings of Charles Darwin: One admires the beautiful and solid case being built up out of his endless heroic observations, almost unconscious or automatic—and then comes a sudden relaxation, a forgetful phrase, and one feels the strangeness of his undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eyes fi xed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. (Stevenson 66)

2.

3.

4.

5.

In this passage, Bishop could be describing herself as the narrative voice in “At the Fishhouses.” Where is she like Darwin: lonely, eyes fi xed on facts and minute details? Can her concentration in the poem be perceived as “useless”? How does it contribute to a “selfforgetting”? What part does religious symbolism play in the poem? Does Bishop use the religious symbolism ironically? How so? Look at the way Bishop uses another animal, the seagull, in “The Unbeliever.” How does this compare with the seal in “At the Fishhouses”? Compare the images of the sea as it is portrayed in both poems. Read Bishop’s earlier poem “The Map.” How does Bishop’s depiction of landscape differ in this poem from “At the Fishhouses”? Look at Bradford House, painted by Andrew Wyeth. How does Bishop use language to conjure images, moods, and emotions similar to those found in the painting?

“Questions of Travel” (1956) “Questions of Travel” belongs to the general category of Bishop’s poetry that could be called travel poems. As does “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” it uses observations made while traveling to provide a context for the poem. “Questions of Travel” is not so concerned with experience and history, however, and considers other, more personal issues such as the ideas of expectation, displacement, and home. As the title poem of the volume, “Questions of Travel” is the third poem in the section of the book entitled “Brazil.” The poems in this section are less individualized than poems appearing in the second section: “Elsewhere,” which deal more with Bishop’s childhood and other experiences that helped shape her life. However, the poems in the Brazil section are “detached” almost by necessity, as if exploring the physical landscape of her new home allowed the freedom to explore other, more private themes. The poems that open the “Brazil” section— “Arrival at Santos” (Complete Poems 89–90); “Brazil, January 1, 1502” (Complete Poems 91–92); and “Questions of Travel”—all deal with various issues arising from living in an unfamiliar environment. While the poems may be concerned with externals of place, they do demonstrate a clear progression and Bishop’s increasing identification with the country. The fi rst, “Arrival at Santos,” published shortly after Bishop arrived in Brazil, details the contrast between expectations and reality of the traveler. We see the country through Bishop’s eyes, as an outsider: “Here is a coast; here is a harbor” (line 1). Everything is viewed as an oddity, curious, strange: “So that’s the flag. I never saw it before. / I somehow never thought of there being a flag” (lines 15–16). The narrator (Bishop) seems disdainful of the port city, concerned more with introducing the comforts of home into the new locale, trying to make the new place as much like the old as possible. However, if the judgment on the port city deems it “inferior,” the poem ends with Bishop’s looking deeper into Brazil: “We leave Santos at once; we are driving to the interior” (lines 39–40).

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The second poem, “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” details a different arrival, the landing of the fi rst Portuguese explorers at the Brazilian bay they believed to be the mouth of a great river, which they named Rio de Janeiro (River of January). Here, though, Bishop imagines the reaction of these new arrivals to the foreign landscape, and it is not the disappointed expectations of tourists disembarking in a busy port city. Instead, these explorers see what they have expected to see and nothing more. For them, Brazil is a savage, godless setting waiting to be tamed and civilized. As “they [rip] away into the hanging fabric, / each out to catch an Indian for himself” (lines 49–50), the true beauty of the locale is lost on them. However, as they conquer the land, Bishop suggests they are not able to tame it completely and are doomed to disappointment, the objects of their pursuit “retreating, always retreating” (line 53). “Questions of Travel” deals again with expectation and disappointment, but this time, the point of view is that of the insider—the traveler who has chosen to stay. But now, the sights have overwhelmed the narrator of the poem when she laments, “There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams / hurry too rapidly to the sea” (lines 1–2). Those waterfalls, like “mile-long, shiny, tearstains” (line 6) force her to reconsider her decision to travel in the fi rst place: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” (line 15). But Bishop acknowledges that “surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road” (line 31), to have missed the fi rsthand experience, to have let her impressions of place been formed by others, which she calls “the whittled fantasies of wooden cages” (line 52). Though she asks the question “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay at home?” (lines 60–61), Bishop ultimately embraces her decision to travel, understanding that flux is the most permanent of conditions.

For Discussion or Writing 1. At the end of the poem, Bishop references a quote by the philosopher Blaise Pascal, who

wrote, “All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own room.” In the poem, she asks whether he “could have been not entirely right?” Using the poem for support, how does she demonstrate her claim? 2. Read “Arrival at Santos” and “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” How does Bishop change in her attitude toward Brazil from these poems in “Questions of Travel”? Why do you think she chose to go back in time in the middle poem? How does this add to her insights into Brazil? 3. One of the major themes in “Questions of Travel” is the idea of expectation versus reality. Read “Arrival at the Waldorf” by Wallace Stevens, which was written after Stevens returned from a trip to Guatemala. What do you think Stevens means when he says, “The wild poem is a substitute. . . . After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.” How do Stevens and Bishop compare actual experience and art created from experience?

“Filling Station” (1964) In her poetry in general, Bishop moves toward a rejection of what she thought of as typical “Dickinson” feminine domain: themes of love, human and divine. However, the role of the feminine still figures as a powerful force in many poems; we see just such an examination of feminine influence as a force of order in “Filling Station.” Written in midcareer, “Filling Station” belongs to the category of Bishop poetry Bonnie Costello describes in Questions of Mastery as “immediate beholders . . . record[ing] feelings and emotions in direct observation rather than detached reflection or description” (37). The point of view in the poem is distinctly feminine, as evidenced in its opening statement, “Oh, but it is so dirty!” (line 1). Uncharacteristically judgmental, the poem introduces the masculine world of the fi lling station as disturbing and potentially dangerous: “Be careful with that match!” (line

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6). When the owner of the station is introduced, he appears brutish, wearing “a dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit” (lines 7–8). However, he is also introduced as “Father,” assisted by two sons, and when the narrator reveals, almost as in confidence “(it’s a family fi lling station)” (line 12), the tone of the poem shifts from disparaging to questioning. Conspicuously feminine objects invade the space: a wicker sofa, a doily, a begonia. Not only do they contrast the masculinity of the station itself, with its hard cement surfaces, they seem to absorb and soften it. Bishop describes the wicker furniture as “crushed and grease-impregnated” (lines 17–18), suggesting an abiding female presence that works to counterbalance the male forces: oil-soaked, greasy, saucy. It is the appearance of the feminine that makes the narrator question what life lies within the station—why the plant, why the doily? Costello proposes that Bishop sees this feminine force as both creative and life affi rming. From the objects themselves, the narrator concludes there must be a creator—a “somebody,” as Bishop names her, who cares enough to decorate and order this world: “Somebody embroidered the doily. / Somebody watered the plant” (lines 34–35). It is the recognition of this unique feminine presence, possessed with both a desire and the ability to transform ugliness into beauty, harshness into civility, that provides the fi nal realization for the poet. The transformative feminine force is both maternal and beneficent, and though the force is never fully revealed, Bishop takes comfort in the final notion that “Somebody loves us all” (line 41).

For Discussion or Writing 1. In the fourth stanza of the poem, Bishop notes that certain objects at the fi lling station are “part of the set.” How does she use this idea of artifice to illustrate her notions of intrusion and reconciliation within the space? 2. Certain objects have distinctly feminine associations or descriptions. Others, such as the “hirsute” begonia, are more ambiguous. List objects that might be more masculine in their connotations—what is the attitude portrayed toward these objects?

3. Read Bishop’s poems “Pink Dog” and “Faustina, or Rock Roses.” How does Bishop deal with gender in these poems as compared to “Filling Station”? How does the notion of class and class sensibilities work in conjunction with or opposition to ideas of gender in these poems?

“Sestina” (1964) It may seem ironic that “Sestina” appears in Questions of Travel, since like “In the Waiting Room,” it is a memory poem of childhood. But as in another poem from the same volume, “First Death in Nova Scotia,” Bishop seems to say to us that memory is a landscape unto itself and worthy of exploration. Originally titled “Early Sorrow,” the poem depicts a scene probably drawn from Bishop’s childhood, the time immediately after her mother’s removal from the Bulmer house in Great Village. The child in the poem draws pictures of “inscrutable” houses, while the weeping grandmother looks on and oversees the daily tasks of the household. Underpinning the poem are the unspoken loss of the unnamed mother and the inability to express grief openly. While the grandmother believes her tears to be hidden, the fact that they are reported to us makes it obvious they are not. However, the third-person narration of the poem coupled with the naïve childlike perceptions create detachment in the poem, making it difficult to discern who is speaking, unless we can identify the voice as the adult Bishop looking back on the scene. Bishop once told her friend Robert Lowell, “When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived” (qtd. in One Art x). This would help to explain the relative isolation of both characters, and that even as they go about their normal routines, it is impossible to overcome the sadness that permeates the world around them. Bishop seems to say that the very activities they participate in—making tea, drawing pictures, telling jokes— are futile attempts to stave off inevitable sorrow. Using the sestina (song of sixes) form, in which six words are repeated in a rolling pattern of six

Elizabeth Bishop 57

stanzas and a concluding three-line envoi, Bishop places emphasis on the repeated words: grandmother, child, stove, almanac, house, and tears. The importance of these simple nouns helps the author, as the child, create a “rigid drawing” of the past. It is the child, now grown, who must attempt to express that which has been repressed and unspoken for so long.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read “First Death in Nova Scotia” and compare the fi rst-person narrator to the third-person narration used in “Sestina.” How does the voice in each poem help Bishop inject the reader into the world of the poem? What would be the effect if Bishop inverted these voices, using fi rst-person point of view in “Sestina” and third-person point of view in “First Death in Nova Scotia”? 2. Both poems detail loss, and in both poems, common objects demand our attention. How does Bishop use these objects to signify a greater understanding of the world? 3. Defi ne inscrutable. Why do you think that Bishop uses that adjective to defi ne the drawing of the house? How does the word apply to the idea of the poet trying to recapture a moment from the past and the poem as a representation of memory?

“In the Waiting Room” (1971) Though this poem did not appear until late in Bishop’s career (published in her last volume of poetry, Geography III), its roots are in her earliest memories. Set in 1918, toward the end of her troubled stay in her paternal grandparents’ home, the incident that underlies the poem is detailed in the fi nal paragraphs of Bishop’s memoir “The Country Mouse”: After New Year’s, Aunt Jenny had to go to the dentist, and asked me to go with her. She left me in the waiting room, and gave me a copy of the National Geographic to look at. It was still getting dark early, and the room had grown very

dark. There was a big yellow lamp in one corner, a table with magazines, and an overhead chandelier of sorts. There were others waiting, two men and a plump middle-aged lady, all bundled up. I looked at the magazine cover—I could read most of the words—shiny, glazed, yellow and white. The black letters said FEBRUARY 1918. A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came over me. I felt . . . myself. In a few days it would be my seventh birthday. I felt I, I, I, and I looked at the three strangers in panic. I was one of them too, inside my scabby body and wheezing lungs. “You’re in for it, now,” something said. How had I got tricked into such a false position? I would be like that woman opposite who smiled at me so falsely every once in a while. The awful sensation passed, then it came back again. “You are you,” something said. “How strange you are, inside looking out. You are not Beppo [her Aunt Jenny’s bull terrier], or the chestnut tree, or Emma [Bishop’s playmate and friend], you are you and you are going to be you forever.” It was like coasting downhill, this thought, only much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree. Why was I a human being? (Complete Prose 32–33)

The poem’s construction is typical for Bishop in that it moves from detailed description in the fi rst half to revelation in the last. However, it also marks a departure for her in that it is the fi rst poem in which Bishop names herself as a character in the poem: “But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth” (line 60). The climax of the poem and the prose piece is a rite of passage—at once a realization of individuality, but with that realization recognition of the isolation that individual identity entails. However, with this recognition of self is a second epiphany, that of a connectedness to the world around her, specifically to herself as a woman: “Why should I be my aunt, / or me or anyone? / What similarities— / . . . held us all together / or made us all just one?” (lines 75–84). Bishop ends the poem with the notice “The War was on” (line 95). Since the poem is set in 1918, the reference to the First World War is obvious.

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Yet, there would also seem to be a second layer of confl ict implied. War has been declared within the young poet, a war of individual identity and expectation for her both as a woman and as a member of the human community.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare the prose account of the events Bishop describes in “The Country Mouse” to those in the poem “In the Waiting Room.” Which details has she omitted, altered, enhanced? Also, the poem seems to build to a new level of understanding not contained in the prose version. How so? 2. Look at the various ways Bishop shifts perspective in the poem, focusing our attention “inward” or “outward.” How does this shift contribute to the meaning of the poem? 3. A “rite of passage” is defi ned as a journey from innocence to awareness. What is young Elizabeth’s rite of passage? Can you recall a similar experience in your own life when you underwent a shift in your perspective to see yourself and the world in a new way?

“The Moose” (1972) If any poem can be called defi nitive, “The Moose” may arguably be the defi nitive Bishop poem. Taking 20 years to complete, it is Bishop’s longest poem and unquestionably combines notable representative elements of other poems from throughout Bishop’s career. As she did with “The Fish,” Bishop claimed that the events narrated within “The Moose” happened almost exactly as she relayed them, altering only minor details of the story’s arrangement, and as she does in “The Fish” and “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop uses interaction with nature and more specifically, an animal, as a means to revelation. She utilizes travel as a theme much as she does in “Questions of Travel” and the idea that when we are displaced, we are in some ways most at home. As in “Sestina” and her short story “In the Village,” Bishop uses “The Moose” to combine ideas of family and loss. And as she does in “The

Unbeliever” and “The Man-Moth,” dreamy visions are a means to revelation. The fi rst six stanzas are one long sentence describing a bus trip from Nova Scotia to Boston—as it happens, the beginning and end points of Bishop’s own life. As the bus makes its way through a richly described landscape in the late afternoon, it is portrayed as a battered traveler, with its “dented flank / of blue, beat-up enamel” (line 30). The travelers inside the bus develop an informal community, and as they look out of the bus into the early evening, they observe a variety of communities, each hinting at the lives led by the individuals who dwell in them. But the glimpses into these other worlds are fleeting: “Five islands, Five Houses, / where a woman shakes a tablecloth / out after supper. / A pale fl ickering. Gone” (lines 58–61). The attitude is amiable, almost adventurous, as the travelers enter the wood, the fog, the night and settle into a surreal state: “A dreamy divagation / begins in the night, / a gentle, auditory / slow hallucination . . .” (lines 87—90). In this section of the poem, the passengers are cocooned within the foggy night, within the bus, within their own worlds. A conversation identified in the poem as “Grandparents’ voices” (line 96) relates personal details from a couple’s life that Bishop likens to intimate exchanges that happen late at night, “Talking the way they talked / in the old featherbed” (lines 121–122). Yet the conversation is, at the same time, universal, and Bishop describes the old couple “talking, in Eternity” (line 98). The conversation covers a catalog of disasters: “deaths, deaths and sicknesses” (line 103); there is even mention of someone “the family had / to put . . . away” (line 113–114), echoing Bishop’s mother’s removal to an institution. But in the list of sorrows, there is also recognition: “A sharp, indrawn breath, half groan, half acceptance, / that means ‘Life’s like that, / We know it (also death)’ ” (lines 118–120). Bishop indicates that it is impossible to avoid loss; more importantly, she says that loss does not function as a vehicle of transcendence; we need merely accept it as a necessary natural condition. The reverie of the night is interrupted when the bus driver stops to look at a large moose that

Elizabeth Bishop 59

has wandered into the middle of the road. Emerging from “the impenetrable wood” (line 134), the moose becomes a symbol of home: Towering, antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house (or, safe as houses), A man’s voice assures us “Perfectly harmless . . .” (lines 139–144)

Again, as in the earlier passages, there is a sense of shared experience and community among the travelers, but in sharp opposition to the melancholy and sadness of the earlier passages, the moose creates wonder and delight: Taking her time, she looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly, Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet sensation of joy? (lines 151–156)

But the journey continues, and though the travelers are granted one last look backward at the moose, they press on into the night, the world of the outer experience and inner reflection combined in “a dim / smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline” (lines 156—159).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Bishop wrote in a letter to Anne Stevenson: My outlook is pessimistic. I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see. But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy—to make life endurable. (quoted in Travisano 204–205) How does “The Moose” support the idea that we must laugh at life instead of being overwhelmed by it?

2. Since “The Moose” contains many elements common throughout Bishop’s poetry, choose one element from the poem to compare how Bishop uses that same idea or technique in another of her pieces. 3. In an article for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Judith Crews, a specialist in comparative literature and languages, notes that in ancient cultures “Trees and forests . . . took on symbolic divine characteristics, or were seen to represent superlative forces such as courage, endurance or immortality. They were the means of communication between worlds.” Does Bishop use the woods to represent “superlative forces”? If so, then how? Emerging from “the impenetrable wood,” can the moose be seen as a divine messenger in the poem?

“One Art” (1976) The general theme of the poems in Geography III, where “One Art” appears, is the reconsideration of life and experience. As Thomas J. Travisano notes in Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, Bishop asks that we see her “not in terms of that life’s particular circumstances and decisions . . . , but in terms of its chosen way of thinking and seeing, in terms of a whole bundle of latent assumptions, commitments, and predilections that bind the person and the artist” (176). To construct the poem, Bishop chose the villanelle, a fi xed form consisting of 19 lines in total. In a villanelle, composed of fi ve tercets and a fi nal quatrain, only two rhyme sounds occur, and the fi rst and third lines of the fi rst stanza are repeated, alternately, as the third line of subsequent stanzas until the last, when they appear as the last two lines of the poem. Bishop varied slightly from the form in that she did not repeat lines entirely through the poem but did repeat the fi nal rhyming words—master and disaster. The use of these two words points toward the underlying theme of the poem—Bishop’s desire to

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master both the art of creation and form as well the art of loss. The poem begins ironically, as she observes, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master; / so many things seem fi lled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster” (lines 1–3). The second stanza suggests that impermanence is the state of being we must all learn to accept as Bishop exhorts the reader to “lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent” (lines 4–5). However, as the poem progresses and the catalog of items “lost” increases, they become more personal and selfreferential. Knowing that Bishop spent her life in motion and was a traveler by nature heightens the pathos when what is lost are “places, and names, and where you meant / to travel” (lines 8–9). The switch to second person you in these lines is not only a summons to the reader, but directly references her own loss of persons and places over time. While Bishop notes the objects lost to her, she only hints at the greater losses they represent. Brett Millier, author of Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, says that in writing the poem, “the poet is giving herself a lesson in . . . losing” (506–507). The loss of a mother’s watch implies a sentimental keepsake but does not mention the sorrow over the loss of the mother herself. The loss of the three loved houses alludes to the houses themselves, but not to the life lived within them. In the fi nal quatrain, Bishop again uses the second person, but this time it is not directed toward the reader or even herself: “—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied” (lines 16–17). Though some critics have speculated that this might be a reference to Alice Methfessel, her last love, it seems also to envelop the loss of Bishop’s beloved Lota. In the fi nal lines of the poem, Bishop again addresses herself (Write it!) (line 19), confi rming her reticence to address such personal matters in such a public way. However, she also seems willing, within the liberating confi nes of her art to do so, as if mastering this level of disclosure might be a greater, though ultimately beneficial form of losing.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Why do you think Bishop chose a fi xed form for this poem? How does the form help contribute to the meaning of the poem? 2. Read Theodore Roethke’s villanelle “The Waking.” How does Roethke’s use of waking and learning compare to Bishop’s idea of mastery and losing? 3. Look at the poem “Dreams” by Langston Hughes. He urges readers to “hold fast,” while Bishop seems to offer just the opposite advice. What comments do you imagine he would offer Bishop on “One Art”? 4. Joseph Campbell discusses a ritual in which individuals relinquish items in order to pass from one stage to the next. Each item represents something of larger meaning to the person (as eyeglasses could be used to represent a love of reading). What items would you choose if you were asked to participate in the ritual of seven things?

“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (1948) Though the poem draws on events and recollections from her journals written at Vassar and from Bishop’s travels in Morocco in 1948, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” did not appear until much later, published in 1955 as a part of the collection A Cold Spring. Divided into three sections or movements, the poem details three different methods of “travel” as a means of gaining knowledge, though each carries with it a certain set of limitations. There is fi rst the orderly study of cataloged details from the concordance; then is the hectic and untidy insight gained from direct observation and experience; fi nally, there is the insight gained from fictions, the imagined recollections and remembrances resulting from the fi rst two. The gravity with which the episodes are outlined in the concordance creates a longing in the author for the tidiness they represent. But there is also recognition that with order entails a certain

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lifelessness and artifice: “Always the silence, the gesture, the speck of birds / suspended on invisible threads above the Site, / or the smoke rising solemnly, pulled by threads” (lines 17–19). Though drawn from real experience and ritual, the notations in the book are unable to capture the vitality of the experiences, “the human figure / far gone in history or theology” (lines 14–15). The absence of life is highlighted by emphasis on details such as the tomb and the dry well; without real people inhabiting the landscape, it is easy to impose meaning, to exchange experience for order. The author is not content with mere arrangement of details, however, and the page with its comforting anonymity gives way to fi rsthand observation, which is anything but somber. Just as the second passage begins with a boat crossing, so the poet crosses into experience. Here, “pock-marked prostitutes / [balance] tea trays on their heads, / and [do] their little belly dances; [fl ing] themselves / naked and giggling against our knees / asking for cigarettes” (lines 51–54). Whereas the concordance was marked with reverential silence, the observed world is characterized by noise and activity. However, there is a price to pay for this exuberant, though totally transient life, and in the middle passage, Bishop confronts “what frightened me most of all” (line 55). As she encounters the grave of a Muslim prophet, she searches for meaning only to be rewarded with dust, and “not even the dust / of the poor prophet paynim who once lay there” (lines 62–63). There are no revelations to be had, “everything only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’” (line 65). It is in the third section that she attempts to reconcile the worlds of the dignified, permanent, ordered concordance and the vitality of the real event. She knows it is the artist who must muster the courage to look deeper, to attempt to discern meaning from experience; similarly, it is the artist who must look at history and imagine it as human experience. As she turns back to the “heavy book,” she questions “Why couldn’t we have seen / this old Nativity while we were at it?” (lines 68–69). The answer, she understands, is that this level of observation is not available to us in reality, but only in imagination; thus the flame that lights the

grotto is “unbreathing.” But in this new reimagining, she proposes, old illusions and myths would be destroyed; in this new way of seeing, the holy family is transformed into “a family with pets” (line 73). Bishop also recognizes that this level may not be gained freely, though what is gained may be greater than what is lost. She ends the poem on a deliberately ambiguous note, as we look “our infant sight away” (line 74). Bishop leaves us with the notion that this third way of experience could destroy innocence, as we exchange artifice for insight. Conversely, it may also allow us to preserve what is truly sacred in each of us—a childlike sense of wonder about the world.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Look at the details Bishop notes from the concordance as examples. How are these details arranged? Similarly, look at the method of presentation in the second section of the poem. Do the same structure and order seem to be at work here? If not, how does Bishop’s method of presentation help to underscore her themes? 2. As she does in many of her poems, Bishop works in “Over 2,000 Illustrations” with a strong understanding of Christian theology. However, she also seems to work consciously outside a traditional Christian framework in reaction to Christian authority and uses Christian symbols as a way to reference secular experience. Read “Cape Breton” and compare it to “Over 2,000 Illustrations.” How does Bishop use Christian imagery to express feelings of triumph, hope, meaninglessness, despair? 3. Do you think Bishop is concerned with destroying old myths/creating new ones in the poem, or is she primarily concerned with a new way of seeing the world?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON BISHOP AND HER WORK 1. Bishop was careful to avoid categorizing her work as feminist or lesbian. However, feminist and lesbian themes do overlay much of her work,

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including “Shampoo” and “Pink Dog.” How does the knowledge of Bishop as a lesbian/feminist writer expand her work? Or does this effort to categorize her limit her? 2. Tennessee Williams writes that The Glass Menagerie is a “memory play,” and that memory distorts and colors history. Understanding Bishop’s need for accurate detail, how would she react to this idea? Or does she engage in this fi ltered perception of history herself? 3. During her lifetime, Bishop did not achieve the popularity of her contemporaries Robert Lowell and Marianne Moore. Moore and Lowell both admired Bishop’s work tremendously, as she did theirs. What general comparisons might you make among these three poets? How is their work similar? What specific influences might you fi nd of one on another? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984. ———. The Complete Poems: 1927–1929. New York: Noonday Press, 1979. ———. Edgar Allan Poe and The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Edited by Alice Quinn. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. ———. One Art: Letters. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Crews, Judith. “Perceptions of Forests.” Unasylva: An International Journal of Forestry and Forest Indus-

tries 54, no. 2 (2003). FAO—Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Available online. URL: http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/ y9882e/y9882e08.htm. Accessed May 21, 2007. “Elizabeth Bishop: American Poet.” Elizabeth Bishop at Vassar College. Elizabeth Bishop Society. Available online. URL: http://projects.vassar.edu/ bishop/index.php. Accessed May 21, 2007. Frost, Carol. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Inner Eye.” New England Review 25 (2004): 250–257. Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. MacMahon, Candace W., ed. Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 1927–1979. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980. McCabe, Susan. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Montiero, George, ed. Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Parker, Robert Dale. The Unbeliever: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Stevenson, Anne. Elizabeth Bishop. Edited by Sylvia E. Bowman. Twayne’s United States Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1966. Zona, Kirstin Hottelling. Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson: The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

James Driggers

Ray Bradbury (1920–

)

Video games are a waste of time . . . real brains don’t do that . . . while they’re doing that, I’ll go ahead and write another novel. (interview with James Hibberd)

T

bury writes literature not set in strange worlds or alternative realities, such as Dandelion Wine, an autobiographical novel about a young boy’s summer in Green Town, Illinois. These works infuse magic into Bradbury’s memories, recreating the nostalgic days of the author’s childhood. Bradbury sees writing as an act of the imagination with which he amuses, purges, and entertains himself. As he states in the introduction of The Stories of Bradbury, “For I am that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all. I remember the day and the hour I was born. I remember being circumcised on the second day after my birth. I remember suckling at my mother’s breast” (Bradbury xiv). He has verified these early details with his mother; this experience later became the impetus for the short story “The Small Assassin,” published in his first collection, Dark Carnival (1947), in which an infant possessing preternatural consciousness murders his mother and then his father. This past provides the setting for his stories, both commonplace and fantastic. Bradbury insists that his ability to see the world as a writer stems from his ability to see through the eyes of a child; he continually calls upon his childhood for inspiration. The Bradbury family did not escape the hardships of the depression. In 1932 Leonard Bradbury moved his family to Tucson for a second time (the first was a year-long trip in 1926 that ended with the death of Bradbury’s infant sister), back to Waukegan,

hough he considers himself a creator of fantasy rather than of “realistic” science fiction worlds, Ray Bradbury remains one of the most famous science fiction writers of the last 100 years. A novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer, playwright, scriptwriter, and novelist, Bradbury has written over 500 works, though he is best known for two novels published early in his career: The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Born in the small town of Waukegan, Illinois, on August 22, 1920, to Leonard Spaulding and Esther Marie Moberg Bradbury, Ray Douglas Bradbury fi rst fed his imagination with the fantastic stories he found in books, comics, magic shows, and movies. In 1923 he and his mother saw the fi lm The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which had a huge impact on his young mind, an event he has recounted in several interviews. He also cites a book of fairy tales his aunt gave him at the age of five, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books at six, Amazing Stories (the fi rst science fiction magazine), Edgar Allen Poe, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan as the foundation of his long career as a reader. In a genre that celebrates technology and futuristic possibilities, Ray Bradbury often sets his stories in his midwestern upbringing; his story lines spring from the ordinary aspects of everyday life. He juxtaposes his childhood and his imagination, planting the fantastical elements he creates in the middle of small town America. Additionally, Brad-

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and then finally to Los Angeles in 1934 in order to find work. Before moving, Bradbury became enamored with magic, meeting Blackstone the Magician, participating in Blackstone’s act, and later becoming friends with a man called Mr. Electrico: Reaching out into the audience, his eyes flaming, his white hair standing on end, sparks leaping between his smiling teeth, he brushed an Excalibur sword over the heads of the children, knighting them with fi re. When he came to me, he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose. The lightning jumped into me. Mr. Electrico cried: “Live forever.” . . . A few weeks later I started writing my fi rst short stories about the planet Mars. From that time to this, I have never stopped. God bless Mr. Electrico, the catalyst, wherever he is. (Bradbury xiv–xv)

Mr. Electrico’s life-affi rming philosophy surfaces in Dandelion Wine (1957), where the young hero, Douglas Spaulding, thrashing about in the childish fight of brothers and tasting his own “rusty warm blood,” experiences a rush of emotions. As every detail of his life becomes clear, he realizes, “I’m alive.” Mr. Electrico shows up a few years later in Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), as a townsperson turned sideshow in Mr. Black’s evil carnival. By the time Bradbury reached Los Angeles in 1934 as a teenager, he had developed the habit of writing four hours a day, a habit that evolved into a one-story-a-day goal that structured his career. Bradbury knew 1930’s Hollywood, fi lling his afternoons by searching out homes of movie stars, a habit that became quite fortuitous; after introducing himself to George Burns and Gracie Allen, he not only secured himself a seat in their first live audience, he also began writing comic skits for the show. This resulted in his first paid job as a writer: the ending scene of a Burns and Allen episode. In 1937 he joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction League and developed friendships with leading science fiction writers including Robert Heinlein, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, and Forrest J. Ackerman. Kuttner in particular was an important influence on him, telling

the young writer to “shut-up” and keep his ideas and energy for himself, and he did. At 20, Bradbury was still selling newspapers on the street; however, one year after his first paid publication for Super Science Stories, a short story titled “Pendulum,” the young writer devoted himself to writing full-time. During this period, he developed a friendship with Leigh Brackett, whose writing he admired and imitated. Her technique aided Bradbury in developing his own writing style. After learning craft under her tutelage, he collaborated with her in writing “Lorelei of the Red Mist” (1946). From this period of apprenticeship, he emerged with his own distinctive style and began writing short stories for multiple science fiction publications. Living in Arizona as a child, Bradbury loved Mexico. While visiting Mexico with his family, he, unlike the rest of his family, instinctively sought to blend in and observe. He remembers feeling embarrassed by his family’s behavior and reactions to Mexican culture: His mother was offended by the images of death, his father was large and loud, and his brother simply hated it. Bradbury, however, was impressed by this first exposure to an alien culture. In 1945 he traveled with an artist friend on a two-monthlong road trip to collect masks for the Los Angeles County Museum. During this time, the Mexican population was growing rapidly in Southern California and conflicts were common. The young author became interested in the prominent role death played in the culture as well as the culture’s seamless union of religion, death, and sensuality and Mexico’s veneration of the past. Increasingly aware of the intersections and differences between the two cultures, Bradbury wove Mexican elements and themes into his writing, first in his short story collection Dark Carnival (1947). The short story “Next in Line” explores the differing values of Americans and Mexicans. A later story, “The Highway” (1951; in The Illustrated Man), depicts a Mexican protagonist, Hernando, who lives a quiet life, occasionally interrupted by tourists who want to take his picture. In it, Bradbury contrasts the two cultures’ reactions to nuclear war. In 1947, after gaining critical attention and drawing an audience for his pulp sci-fi in Super Science

Ray Bradbury 65

Stories and bizarre fantasy stories in Weird Tales, he published Dark Carnival, a collection of dark fantasy that transcended the science fiction genre. He also received the O. Henry Memorial Award for “The Homecoming” and radio renditions of “The Meadow” and “Riabouchnska,” which aired on ABC and CBS. On September 27, 1947, Ray Bradbury married Marguerite Susan McClure, with whom he would share a 56-year marriage and four daughters. A lover of literature, Marguerite was instrumental in Bradbury’s success. In the early years of their marriage, she maintained a day job so that her husband could stay at home and continue his rigorous schedule of producing at least one short story a day. When she became pregnant in 1949, Maggie provided the impetus for Bradbury to write The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), establishing his professional reputation. In 1953 he published The Golden Apples of the Sun, a collection of short stories, and the novel Fahrenheit 451. Science fiction traditionalists derided these two books and The Illustrated Man because Bradbury did not use scientific theory as a basis for the creation of believable new worlds. However, this negative criticism did not hinder the young author, who focused on the constantly changing world around him. Unlike most of his science fiction contemporaries, Bradbury wrote metaphorically of the past while commenting on the present, depicting a bleak future consumed by a vaguely represented technologically based society. As his writing developed, he continued to move outside the science fiction genre. In 1956 he wrote a screenplay for the John Huston adaptation of Moby-Dick; the following year he published Dandelion Wine. Following that, he published Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), a fantasy set in Green Town, and in many ways a further exploration of Dandelion Wine. In the following years, Bradbury continued to produce fiction but also turned his eye to drama. He published a collection of plays, The Anthem Sprinters (1963), and received an Academy Award nomination for his animated film Icarus Montgolfier Wright. Next he produced The World of Bradbury (1964) in the Coronet Theater in Los Angeles, following it with The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit. In 1966 the fi lm ver-

sion of Fahrenheit 451 hit movie theaters, and Dandelion Wine the musical debuted at Lincoln Center in New York in 1967. Two years later, The Illustrated Man was also adapted for the big screen. In the next few decades, Bradbury produced an impressive body of work, beginning with the short story collection I Sing the Body Electric (1969). He followed the collection with several volumes of poetry, plays, countless short stories and short story collections, essays on writing (Zen and the Art of Writing, 1989), and several novels. The last of these, Let’s All Kill Constance, was published in 2002. At present, the author’s works have been translated into 13 languages. He has been interviewed over 350 times, received awards too numerous to count, and been included in over 1,200 anthologies. Bradbury writes what he is—an American farm boy, raised in the quiet pre–depression era Midwest, with an imagination voraciously fueled by pulp science fiction, fantasy, scary movies, and adventure stories.

The Martian Chronicles (1950) After the successful publication of Dark Carnival (1947), Bradbury’s editor suggested working on a longer narrative form. Immediately Bradbury began compiling a series of stories he had previously written about the Earth’s colonization of Mars. Adding connecting events and chapters, he published The Martian Chronicles in novel form. With these stories, the author joined his dual visions of the idyllic American past, here dubbed “Green Bluff,” and the last frontier for humanity, alien worlds. Written as a series of journal entries with dates heading each chapter, Martian Chronicles focuses on action: the colonization of a planet. Thus, the characters are less developed; the sporadic protagonists rarely extend into later chapters. Episodic in form (having a series of incidents that can stand alone but are loosely connected by characters or a setting), the novel contains gaps in time and space between the chapters the reader must fi ll. The theme of conquest helps unify the work, connecting the plotlines, driving the action

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of the novel, and relating its plot to historical realities: the history of Western colonization of Asian, African, and American countries. After a short chapter depicting a rocket launch that catalyzes Ohio’s transition from winter into summer, Bradbury tells the first few stories from the Martian creatures’ point of view. Telepathic, they know that the humans’ arrival is imminent. After a series of unsuccessful missions, the humans dominate the planet. They unintentionally contaminate Mars, killing off the Martian population. Then an atomic war breaks out on Earth, resulting in the rapid exodus of the Martian colonists back to Earth, fearing for their friends, family, and way of life. The reader is left with a deserted Mars and an ending that marks a new beginning: a group of Earthlings who witness the final days of the war that destroys Earth. With this initial novel Bradbury appealed to the larger literary community and garnered respect—a feat not often accomplished by pulp sci-fi writers. He also fascinated his core science fiction audience, but the science fiction elements, for example, the Martian world’s physical imagery, remain on the periphery, serving metaphorical functions. Concentrating on the telepathy of the aliens and their similarities to and differences from human interpersonal relations, Bradbury conveys an earthly message, examining how the various individual interactions affect and shape the larger communities in which they operate. In the second chapter, the reader fi rst meets a Martian protagonist: Ylla, a married Martian woman, the first to sense the imminent arrival of Earthlings. Through a telepathic dream state she anticipates the arrival of human explorers. Her dreams are flooded with images of Nathaniel York, one of the two-man crew that is the first to explore the planet. The episode ends as Ylla’s husband, out of either anxiety or jealousy (it is unclear), shoots the men on a “hunting” expedition. The following chapters expand on this telepathic phenomenon, with increasingly complicated ends to the successive human visits. The reader experiences the confusion brought about by these strange encounters from both sides of the story, empathizing with the Martian and human communities and giving both the Martian and human characters a voice. While the Martians are relegated to

ghosts early in the narrative, they continue to haunt the story as it progresses. The fourth attempt is successful, in part because the Martians were infected with chicken pox, which was introduced by the previous human expeditions. This event mirrors the genocide that occurred in the Americas when millions of indigenous peoples died in the first few years of European exploration. The reaction here is one of surprise but not horror, and, in the end, it comes in handy: “Chances are a few of the Martians, if they were smart, escaped to the mountains. But there aren’t enough . . . to be a native problem.” The genocide does not taint the event for the crew, and in the following chapter the settlers begin to arrive. Before this happens, however, Bradbury provides a word of caution through Jeff Spender, an archaeologist who knows the annihilation of culture and history about to take place. Of all the crew members only he bemoans the death of the Martian race. Through him, Bradbury explores the ethical responsibility of explorers. Spender stands in opposition to the crew, who get drunk and arrogantly name locations after themselves. This act of naming becomes the symbolic vehicle for the destruction of the Martian culture: “The names we give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.” The moral compass or conscience of the story, Spender intends well; however, his reaction to the colonization process also has its roots in American history; he is the well-intentioned frontiersman who loses himself in the alien culture—he defends the extinct Martian species. Bradbury reexamines the concept of the pioneer spirit in The Martian Chronicles, and he portrays for his readers a reckless co-opting of land already inhabited by creatures with thoughts and feelings. The novel challenges the idea that the power or ability possessed by a particular community gives moral permission to that community to act on in order to achieve a self-serving end. He proposes that “science ran too far ahead of us too quickly and people got lost in the mechanical wilderness . . . emphasizing

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machines instead of how to run the machines.” Bradbury presents his readers with a hypothetical colonization, one that could be a natural extension of human nomadic exploration, which is at the foundation of American history—if only we were technologically capable. Written in the aftermath of World War II and the atomic bomb and with a prescient awareness of the increasingly imperialistic tendencies of the ever-growing United States and Russian military forces and the increasing threat of nuclear annihilation, Martian Chronicles carries a cautionary warning; however, Bradbury does not leave his characters without hope. When the Earth succumbs to a worldwide atomic war, the humans who make their way to Mars have a different intention than the previous explorers who fashioned the world into a satellite planet of Earth. The father of the initial family to return to the deserted planet Mars ritualistically burns old maps and other documents associated with Earth, explaining to his children, “I’m burning a way of life.” Bradbury first introduces a Martian, asking the readers to empathize with a creature about to be destroyed by an invading species. We feel regret for the rapid and untimely end of the Martian species. As the book’s action parallels the history of Western conquest and mirrors many events in our shared cultural past, it allows us to step outside our collective experience and see it as distinct from our own history. In this way we are able to view it more objectively and critically.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Bradbury’s novel of the future makes a comment on the American past. Consult a scholarly history source to get background information on the colonization of America. What parallels do you see between the colonization in The Martian Chronicles and the United States’ own history as pioneers of the New World? Compare and contrast the Martians’ initial reaction to the Earthlings to that of Native Americans to the first Europeans to reach North America. 2. The chapter “Way in the Middle of the Air,” in which a southern black community builds their own rockets and leaves Earth, continues to generate controversy. As did the Marcus Garvey back

to Africa movement of the 1920s, Bradbury presents an image of African Americans emigrating from the United States. Discuss the significance of The Martian Chronicles chapter, in reference to the cultural context in which it was written. What does the inclusion of such an event add to Bradbury’s criticism of the American past? 3. In the chapter “And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” both Captain Wilder and the archaeologist Jeff Spender approach Mars with a level of respect that exceeds that of the general crew. Compare and contrast their reactions. Are Spender’s actions more admirable? Why or why not? Consider Wilder’s role at the end of the book in “The Long Years” as well. As one of the few characters appearing in more than one episode, what does he symbolize? 4. Even in his early years, Bradbury’s brand of science fiction stood apart from the larger sci-fi community. Compare and contrast this work with the Isaac Asimov’s I Robot, also published in 1950. Would you describe The Martian Chronicles as a work of science fiction? Why, or why not?

“There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the penultimate chapter of The Martian Chronicles, shifts momentarily from the deserted Mars to an empty house on the dying planet Earth. This short episode takes place in an Allendale, California, house after a nuclear holocaust has ended earthly life. The chapter opens with the house’s morning alarm at seven o’clock, “Time to get up, time to get up!” Fully automated and designed to aid in the everyday needs of its inhabitants, the house cooks breakfast, reminds its absent family of important appointments, and cautions that today is a day for raincoats. As the house continues its daily rituals, the omniscient, allknowing narrator explains that this is the only house left standing in a “ruined city” that glows green with radiation that can be seen for miles at night. Later, as the house winds down the day, creating a warm atmosphere for after-dinner repose, the voice from behind the walls recites a poem, a favorite of Mrs.

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McClellen, the home’s former mistress. The poem, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” describes a time when humankind has perished, “And Spring herself, when woke at dawn / Would scarcely know that we were gone.” Immediately after this a tree bough falls on the house, causes a fire, and, in a rushing inferno of prose and mechanical screams, the house falls; a lone voice from the sole surviving wall announces, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is. . . .” This episode encapsulates the author’s theme of the dangers of unrestrained technology. The poem that centers the chapter speaks of animals in harmony with the thriving natural world. This natural world sharply contrasts with the world outside the house, which, at present, lies in ruins. The poem, however, also speaks of a future in which the world, impervious to the violence enacted by human beings, will heal itself. In this sentiment Bradbury provides hope that even in this worst-case scenario of utter destruction, there is always a rebirth. The chapter provides a stark portrait of humanity, a cumbersome and unnecessary intrusion on an otherwise peaceful, self-sustaining planet. The poem describes the triumph of nature in the wake of humanity’s folly. Though the Earth’s most sophisticated creatures have succeeded in destroying themselves, the planet will continue to produce life. The image of the house demonstrates Bradbury’s technique of blending the fantastic with the ordinary. While the house is a futuristic design, it maintains a traditional, all-American atmosphere consistent with Bradbury’s nostalgic use of his midwestern past. The kitchen makes eggs and pancakes; the living room provides a warm fireplace to sit by, a perfectly lit cigar to enjoy after dinner, and a Sara Teasdale poem popular during Bradbury’s childhood. Ironically, this obsession with technology recreates an idealized past and creates more leisure time, but it also has a high price: the abandonment of ethical thinking and moral decision making. The only sentient character in the chapter, the family dog, suffering from the effects of nuclear radiation, makes his way home to die. As he seeks out his masters, he becomes both follower and victim of the human design: the only example of life on Earth, a painful reminder of the widespread suf-

fering of the poisoned planet. A symbol for faithfulness, “man’s best friend,” he goes back home to be saved by the humans but is only tormented by locked doors and the smell of food. Here the narrator shows how humanity’s destructiveness extends to other species, as it already has to the Martians. Bradbury equates the rhythms of the house to religious rituals of devotees whose “gods had gone away.” Robotic mice emerge from the walls to clean the house, and the kitchen serves up its daily offerings on schedule. Ironically, the human beings, gods of their own technological creations, are now a virtually extinct species. Machines designed to protect and ease human life bring about its end; the house stands like an empty shrine to a failed system. The silhouettes in the front yard are ghostly images on an otherwise blackened wall, images of the absent gods. Their presence deepens the image of reverence created by the house’s lonely routine. The silhouettes depicting the family in the yard are reminiscent of the silhouettes found in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. The use of the image is haunting and, written only a few years after the bombs had been dropped, all too real. The poem’s story tells of a rebirth, but the story in which it is framed is an ending. Immediately after the last refrain, “the house began to die,” the narrator describes this death in emotional language. The house screams an alarm, “fire, fire, fire,” in an effort to alert sleeping humans; however, it reads like the desperate screams of a trapped victim. Image after image supports the atmosphere of a violent and anguished death. The machine itself, representing the greater technological vehicle that consumed humanity, is the final victim.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Personification is a form of metaphor by which an author applies human characteristics to nonhuman things. Bradbury specifically applies human emotions to various attendants of the mechanized house. Identify examples of personification within the text and discuss how they affect the reading of the story. 2. Why is “There Will Come Soft Rains” central to the larger work? Compare and contrast this chap-

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ter with the images of Mars after the Martians have all succumbed to chicken pox. 3. The image of the dog desperately looking for his humans and trying to get at the food in the kitchen is vivid and painful to read. What is the function of this scene in the story? Discuss your impression of his homecoming and subsequent death. 4. Compare and contrast the images provided by the poem with the images of the world outside the house as told by the narrator. 5. Much of the chapter deals with the passing of time, which is chronicled by the house as it meets its end. What is time’s function in the chapter? What does the strict routine in the house say about the family who lived there? Does this support Bradbury’s critique of technology throughout the novel? Why or why not?

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Along with Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 helped establish Bradbury’s literary reputation and earn his works a place in the American literary canon. A popular text filled with social relevance, the book was adapted for film in 1966 and for the stage in 1979. As did many of his longer works, Fahrenheit 451 started out as a short story, titled “The Fireman,” which was published in Galaxy Science Fiction (1951). Set in a futuristic society that bans books and fosters complacency through mind-numbing media, the novel focuses on Guy Montag, fireman number 451, who works for a firehouse that burns homes reported to have books inside. Once, in the distant past, the station put fires out instead of setting them, but the past, especially in a world without books, without history, remains a mythical shadow. Montag’s need to discover the past drives the narrative and leads him to seek answers in books. He makes friends with a neighbor, 17-year-old Clarisse McClellan, who questions Montag about his occupation and challenges his unexamined acceptance of society, forcing him to face his own discontent. Frustrated further by his wife’s commitment to their superficial world, Montag sees Mildred’s sui-

cide attempt as a consequence of their empty lives. Montag becomes obsessed with finding out about the taboo texts; eventually the fi refighters target his home after Captain Beatty, the fire chief, discovers Montag’s subversive activities. Seeking help from a man named Faber, a retired English professor, Montag escapes the city and finds a vagabond group of intellectuals, led by a man named Granger. They are “the Book People,” readers who memorize texts, the preservers of the written word. Montag memorizes Ecclesiastes, the one book he has found and read, and joins them. Ecclesiastes is a book of the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament, that ponders human existence, takes a dark view of life, and serves as a repository of wisdom and truths. These words soothe Montag; he finds comfort in the ancient text. Just as he is calming from his flight, bombs strike the city, and an atomic war “begins and ends in an instant.” The story concludes as Montag walks with “the Book People” toward the dead city, reciting Ecclesiastes to himself and looking toward a future “with everything to think about and much to remember.” At the onset of the novel, Montag is satisfied with his life. The opening chapter describes the “pleasure” he derives from watching “things eaten, to see things blacken and changed.” Montag knows the power he wields and takes pride in his social status. He is a respected man, a defender of the peace. A few unexpected encounters, however, cause Montag’s world to come apart. During his initial conversation with Clarisse he is uncomfortable, musing that he can literally see “himself in her eyes.” Later, as he reflects upon her strange questions, the reader senses that he sees, as he looks back, his own buried discontent. Montag struggles to make sense of his world with mentor figures, his wife and a strangely close family, and through Clarisse’s anecdotes. When his faith in the system shatters, he scrambles to find some direction; through much of this process he acts mistakenly and makes misguided decisions. He is an antihero, an ordinary man who is not perfect. The overarching theme in Fahrenheit 451 is censorship. The futuristic world that Bradbury creates censors knowledge. Bradbury crafts the book with the present and the many forms of censorship that

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occur in our society kept in mind. Thus, while Bradbury speaks to a “present” that is now some 60 years past, the novel is darkly prophetic. Bradbury’s novel features the censorship of books most prominently but also describes a world that limits individuality, freedom of thought, and creativity. As Faber explains to Montag, the books represent dangers the society tries to eradicate: “It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books.” The novel depicts a world opposed not only to free thought but also to intellectualism, with liberal arts—subjects such as sociology, philosophy, history, and literature—considered especially dangerous. These ways of seeing the world stimulate individual thinking, which leads to confl ict, something the society seeks to prevent at all costs. As Montag demands answers to his questions about the past, his behavior becomes more erratic. After he steals a book from a job and calls in sick, Montag attracts the attention of his boss, Captain Beatty, who can be viewed as Montag’s foil: Beatty’s values and beliefs contrast with the younger fireman’s and serve to highlight Montag’s exceptionality in the context of the story. Beatty is zealous in his support of the social structure; through him Bradbury fi lls in what has transpired in the past: the history of the firehouse, how books began to be banned, and how “the word intellectual . . . became the swear word it deserved to be.” An ironic character who burns books yet is also highly literate, Beatty quotes literature and knows history. He is not a numb citizen like Mildred; Beatty is a creator of the system, whereas Mildred is a product of the oppressive social order. Beatty tells Montag that the trouble with books started when special interest or minority groups found certain passages or works offensive and sought to remove them. He describes a world of growing populations and with them, increasing amounts of minority groups living in ever-closer proximity to each other: “The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!” Here Beatty raises the challenge of living in a diverse culture. He suggests that the differences between these splintered groups are petty; nonetheless, they disrupt the harmony of the mass population. Beatty describes how, before books began to be banned, abridged cop-

ies of various texts circulated with the controversial bits removed. The media began to address the entire mass audience in an attempt to pacify smaller groups and entertain the whole. The result, Beatty claims, is a peaceful and happy culture. Yet what Beatty calls “peace” and “happiness” translates practically into obedience and complacency. This is illustrated by the reference to Mildred’s suicide attempt as a common phenomenon in the city. What he describes is a natural progression in the shaping of culture, but Beatty does not volunteer the underlying truth that the government’s subtle yet highly effective influence has shaped the course of events. By de-emphasizing authorship and ideas and instead supporting the proliferation of mass media, the establishment numbs people to their differences rather than learning to work with them. Beatty explains that severe abridgment of texts was the first step. It eliminated diverse and conflicting ideas. In many of these passages we can see parallels to Bradbury’s own experiences as a writer. Bradbury writes long, luxurious passages filled with detail. His images are rich and vivid. As have many widely read authors, Bradbury has often been asked to abridge his works for anthologies and has received unsolicited suggestions to change content. In the coda at the end of Fahrenheit 451 the author writes, “There is more than one way to burn a book.” He rejects the idea of condensing literary works and argues that every detail is important in his works. Through Faber, the author defends his position on high-quality literature: “The more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can fit on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. . . . Telling detail. Fresh detail.” Bradbury’s works have been considered controversial; by the time he wrote Fahrenheit 451 he had witnessed the censorship of literature from schools as well as some book burnings. Written in a time when pieces of literature such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were under attack, Bradbury’s novel addressed pressing issues that we still face today. These very real issues provide the inspiration for his fantasy. The ramifications of censoring texts are horrifying. Doing so changes knowledge itself. Omitting offending details pacifies the public, but it

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also simplifies the content, reducing knowledge to an elementary level. Unchallenged, the citizen’s intellect is numbed; ignorance evolves into fear. A significant intellectual gap develops in Montag’s society. The majority of people escape through the mass media; however, a few still cling to a lifestyle associated with books. Enter the firemen. The reassignment of the firemen illustrates the intrusion of the government on ideas: “We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.” What Beatty describes is a natural shift away from books altogether that the people demand. An examination of Mildred exposes this myth. Advertising controls her desires. Mildred listens to a constant stream of ads on the Seashell radio that fits in her ear whenever she is not in the TV parlor—even in her sleep. She seems to be satisfied with her life; however, her suicide attempt suggests that subconsciously the emptiness of her existence haunts her. The next day she cannot even recall her actions. Characters in the novel like Mildred are fragile, both mentally and emotionally. They are threatened by philosophy and literature. When Montag reads a poem to Mildred and her friends, Mrs. Phelps breaks down in tears, Mrs. Bowles becomes enraged, and Mildred is consumed with embarrassment. They distrust the strange words, and each of the three women calls the firehouse, exposing Montag to Captain Beatty. Montag makes a deliberate break from his society; however, he also seeks safety in the perspective of an old man he had met in the park a year prior. An ostracized professor turned recluse, Faber is all too aware of this phenomenon. Fear eats away at him; he is a victim of the society and, ironically, illustrates the role intellectuals have played in the demise of academia. He is full of fear and acknowledges his own complacency as he watches the world move further and further away from books and art. While Beatty explains the inferiority felt by the layperson, Faber illustrates the sometimes-arrogant superiority of the educated. As he and Montag put together a halfbaked plan to wage their own private rebellion, Faber tries to control Montag’s actions through a two-way earpiece. There is a schism between Montag, who is the major actor in changing the status quo, and

Faber, the academic who has all the ideas but none of the courage to act. Montag seeks him out for aid in finding his own independence, but in the moment of crisis, Faber becomes just another voice in his ear. His intentions are genuine, but he ends up functioning just as the Seashell and Beatty do. Thus, the animosity felt by the greater population for its brightest minds is warranted. Much of what we, as 21st-century readers, experience as the past in the narrative had not yet come to fruition when Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 (1953). We can now drive 70 miles per hour on the highways; advertisements fi ll up our empty spaces, while cell phones and portable music fill up our quiet spaces. Rural areas continue to diminish. Our culture witnesses pursuits of fugitives on television, occasionally in live broadcasts, and television is an ever-increasing part of the home. Perhaps the novel is more haunting today, not only in its portrayal of the future, but also in its similarities to the present. As do many writers and historians, Bradbury portrays a negative social phenomenon, in this case censorship, while hoping to prevent it. The story ends with outcasts’ making a new beginning. As in The Martian Chronicles, the survivors must use lessons of the past to construct a more intentional and careful future, one where the society will admit complexity and dissension rather than masking conflict with uniformity. The principal tool in that struggle is memory. The characters in Fahrenheit 451 have no knowledge of what preceded them, and that handicaps their ability to build autonomous lives. While the foundation of a new society lies in the memory of the Book People, the new society must also remember how they arrived at a place where ideas were outlawed, “the temperatures at which books burn” was Fahrenheit 451, and the simplification of mass-released texts mollified the public, making them easy to control. The book, therefore, embraces the careful recording and studying of history and argues that remembering the past is crucial to constructing the future.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How do images of the natural world function in the novel? Discuss Clarisse’s connection with

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nature. How does this affect her view of the world? Montag hides books at the beginning of the novel but does not read them. What becomes significant then is why he finally reads. Analyze the events that lead to Montag’s desire to read. Consider the other characters who influence his thinking and decision making. Evaluate why he ultimately begins reading books and why reading is significant to Montag and to the novel. While Beatty ultimately foils Montag and Faber’s plans, do the plans the two make seem significant to the novel and its overall message? With that in mind, imagine that Beatty did not interrupt the two rebels. Would the two of them have been able to save the civilization eventually? Why or why not? Additionally, consider why Bradbury creates Beatty as a foil. Is he providing a social commentary by doing so? Why or why not? Part of what makes the novel so powerful is its troubling ending. Do you think Ray Bradbury’s conclusion in Fahrenheit 451 does an adequate job of conveying a message? If so, why? If not, how would you change the ending to make your message more forceful? At the center of the novel lies an important issue to America: freedom of speech, a right guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Research the First Amendment at a trustworthy Web site such as http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/. After learning about what the amendment says, evaluate the novel in light of free speech in today’s world and the many ways it has been challenged. With your research in mind, is Fahrenheit 451 still relevant today? Is free speech in danger? Why or why not? Write an essay on freedom of speech in the novel. Compare and contrast Beatty and Faber. How does each use his knowledge? Are they both manipulative? Why or why not? What does the reader learn from the juxtaposition of these characters? Considering the elements of Fahrenheit 451 that depict technology in the 21st century, is Bradbury’s future possible? Why, or why not?

Dandelion Wine (1957) As does the conductor of an orchestra, Douglas Spaulding, the protagonist of Dandelion Wine, directs the dawning of a new summer: “He pointed a fi nger . . . a sprinkle of windows came suddenly alight miles off in dawn country.” The summer of Douglas’s 12th year is the subject of Bradbury’s most autobiographical work. Memories of Bradbury’s idyllic childhood fi ll the book, which takes place in Green Town, Illinois, during the summer of 1928. Douglas’s home bustles with life and a cast of characters: parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents, boarders—a community of diverse personalities. The narrative memorializes the past and depicts the process of restoring Bradbury’s memories. The fi rstborn, Douglas, has a younger brother, Tom. Although Douglas is the principal explorer and the subject of the novel is his own discovery, it is through Tom that Bradbury remembers his feelings of admiration for an older brother, “even when that brother ditched him” (Bradbury ix). As does Bradbury, Douglas loves movies like The Phantom of the Opera and walking home by the ravine at night with his friends. He begins writing early in life. Though Douglas’s writing differs from Bradbury’s own early stories, Douglas records the summer, chronicling what he calls “Rites and Ceremonies” and reflecting on them in a second part, “Discoveries and Revelations.” At the same time, Douglas becomes profoundly aware of existence, his own life, and eventually develops a concept of death. Dandelion Wine portrays a child losing his innocence; throughout the text Douglas transitions from child to adolescent in a community swirling in the cycle of life. While Douglas writes, his grandfather bottles wine from the dandelions growing on the wide lawn, a bottle for every day of summer. The wine is a metaphor: As Douglas’s writing does, the wine preserves things and represents the passing of time. Douglas finds, however, that the bottles do not always match his recollections—sometimes shining brighter with happy memories or other times producing dark, cloudy wine on days that were sad. Unlike Douglas’s writing, the wine’s preservation is temporary, stocked for the following winter to lend a little warmth to the

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cold seasons. It will need to be remade as the memory of the summer days fades. Douglas’s grandfather cautions him of this; memories, like the wine bottles, will be replaced with new ones and those days become a blur, with one or two unusual moments standing out. Tom insists that he can hold on to every day; Douglas has begun to realize the passing of memory this summer. The dandelion, the harvest, the bottling and later drinking of the wine symbolize the cyclical nature of the seasons and the passing of time. Memory functions as a motif—an idea or image that recurs throughout the text. It not only recurs in Dandelion Wine, but runs throughout Bradbury’s works, a sign of preoccupation with preserving the past. Douglas and his friends dub Colonel Freeleigh a “Time Machine” because he tells them stories that delve into his memories and send the children back through time. Fascinated by Freeleigh’s stories, the children sense their importance; the tales feed the children’s imaginations and enlarge their worldview. Machines serve as antagonizing elements in the text. Yet, although they resist the passing of time, they eventually succumb to time and use and wear down as they age. The neighbor, Lou Huffman, tries to make a Happiness Machine but ultimately realizes that family provides more happiness that any external structure. The Green Machine, an electric motorcar, symbolizes technology and its dangers. The elderly ladies who own it, Miss Fern and Miss Roberta, have an accident and believe they have killed a man. Here the past, represented by the old ladies, and the new age of technology intersect. The women decide never to use the Green Machine again, and the issue is put to rest; the town trolley, another symbol of the past, is taken off its tracks to make way for a new and faster bus system. Even the Time Machine, Colonel Freeleigh, passes away, though his family tries to protect him, and Douglas’s group laments the loss of his valuable memories. Bradbury transforms the often-troublesome dandelion weed into a symbol of life itself, creating a fantastic story out of everyday, ordinary elements. Here, the author infuses magic into an otherwise realistic tale. Dandelion Wine describes the wonder

of discovery and imagination: Douglas’s changing, ever-expanding view of the world. Even when the point of view shifts to the minds of adults, his voice remains; the story is fi ltered through Douglas’s consciousness. Douglas’s obsession with the tarot card witch at the traveling carnival show illustrates both his and Bradbury’s obsession with enchantment. While the carnival is a rundown place with an alcoholic manager, Douglas believes it houses a gypsy fortune-teller in the body of an old wax witch. He thinks that if he can only set her free, through spells and potions found in the library, she will give him a fortune: “It’ll say we’ll live forever, you and me, Tom, we’ll live forever.” Similarly, Douglas believes in a magical cure for the illness that strikes him late in the story, a sickness that occurs after his many revelations. Douglas’s friend Mr. Jonas, the junkman, has bottles of air from exotic places in the past that cool and revive Douglas. After breathing in the aromatic vapors, Douglas is restored, and his family notices the “scent of cool night and cool water and cool snow” on his breath. There is room here to interpret that the magic occurs not only in Douglas’s mind but also in the collective conscious of the family and, to a larger degree, the town. If such conjuring were an accepted part of the characters’ lives, it could be called magical realism, a literary term used for describing texts where unrealistic elements emerge from otherwise realistic stories. Dandelion Wine, however, deals largely with fantasy, infusing imagination into an idyllic world that, although placed in a realistic setting, does not attempt to represent the political and historical realities that can be associated with such magical realist writers as Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or Isabel Allende. Dandelion Wine deals with realities we cannot express with scientific explanations, the metaphysical, fantastical elements of our lives: existence, time, memory, death. The more Douglas becomes aware of being alive, the more he experiences loss. Throughout the summer Douglas suffers varying degrees of loss, from the death of his great-grandmother to the relocation of his best friend, John Huff. Douglas tries to deny the existence of loss, distracting himself with the tarot, but eventually faces the inexplicable, temporary nature of our lives

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and our ultimate powerlessness over time when he is struck with illness. Miraculously, though, as the summer ends, Douglas still holds on to life’s magical qualities and continues to see the world as a place of limitless possibilities. The story ends as new school supplies appear in store windows and Grandpa Spaulding takes the porch swing off the porch for the year. The novel concludes as Douglas looks to the next summer, which will be “even bigger, nights will be longer and darker, more people dying, more babies born, and me in the middle of it.” With all of its revelations and surprises; its emphasis on growth, imagination, and wonder, the novel ends as it begins, in the third-story cupola bedroom of Douglas’s grandparents’ house as he puts the town to bed, “and sleeping, put an end to summer.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast Dandelion Wine with Bradbury’s short story “The Man Upstairs,” a work that also takes place in Green Town, Illinois. 2. The ravine is a strong figure in the story that represents a challenge to various characters. Discuss the symbolism of the ravine and the way it functions in Douglas’s life. Contrast this to Miss Lavinia’s experiences there. 3. Research the year 1928 and consider why Bradbury set the novel during the summer of this year. Consult a general reference source or a reliable Web site such as http://www.infoplease.com/ year/1928.html. 4. Using an encyclopedia or trustworthy Web site such as http://www.raybradbury.com/index. html, evaluate why Bradbury’s works have been so popular. What themes do they contain that make them appealing? What is it about Bradbury’s style that draws such a large readership? 5. Both Dandelion Wine and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace are coming-of-age stories in which the novels’ protagonists come to terms with loss. Write an essay comparing the two works and the ways the protagonist in each copes with and eventually begins to understand loss.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON BRADBURY AND HIS WORK 1. In literature, attempting to describe a person, place, or event with believable detail is referred to as verisimilitude. Does Bradbury achieve verisimilitude in his science fiction works? Consider the details of both the society and the physical surroundings in The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. What does detail add to or take away from the overall themes of the works? 2. Compare and contrast Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 with George Orwell’s 1984. What do the two have in common regarding their view of the future? What aspects have been actualized in our own society today? Use a scholarly source to familiarize yourself with dystopian literature. How do reading visions of dystopias impact our view of the present world? 3. The American story is replete with successive waves of frontier settlement. Each incoming wave displaced the earlier one: pioneers displaced Indians, pushing them farther west, and led the way for poor settler families, who were later joined and supplanted by middle-class families and professionals. Compare and contrast this process with The Martian Chronicles. 4. Hugh Holman’s A Handbook to Literature defi nes science fiction as “a form of fantasy in which scientific facts, assumptions, or hypotheses form the basis, by logical extrapolation, of adventures in the future, on other planets, in other dimensions in time, or under new variants of scientific law.” Is this an apt description of science fiction? If so, how does Bradbury’s work fit in? 5. See the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11, whose title is derived from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Why does Moore use this title? What comparisons between the film and book can be made? Can you see why Bradbury wanted Moore to change the title? 6. See an episode of Star Trek or The X-Files. What comparisons can you make to Bradbury’s works? Do you find that Bradbury influenced the writers of these two television shows? How so?

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7. As a child Bradbury read about many myths, especially Greek mythology. What mythological references can you fi nd in his works? How has mythology helped shape Bradbury’s vision? 8. Read Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Pit and Pendulum,” or “The Cask of Amontillado.” What comparisons can you make between Poe’s works and Bradbury’s? What thematic and stylistic elements do the two authors share? WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Aggelis, Steven L. Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Aldiss, Brian W. Trillion Year Spree. New York: Avon Books, 1988, 247–248. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. New York: Arno Press, 1975, 105–113. Attebery, Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, 133–141. Bloom, Harold. Writers of English: Lives and Works Modern Fantasy Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Bradbury, Ray. The Stories of Ray Bradbury. Knopf, New York: New York, 1980. Brians, Paul. “Study Guide for Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.” Dr. Paul Brians’ Home Page. Washington State University. Available online. URL: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/science_fiction/martian_chronicles.html. Accessed June 11, 2006. Cherry, Jim. “Future Tense Sci-Fi Legend Ray Bradbury Going Strong.” Conversations with Ray Bradbury. Edited by Steven L. Aggelis. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Eller, Jonathan. “The Body Electric: Sources of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.” University of Mississippi Studies in English 11 (1995): 376–410. Eller, Jonathan R., and William F. Touponce. Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Greenberg, Martin Harry, and Joseph D. Olander, eds. Ray Bradbury. New York: Taplinger, 1980

Hibberd, James. “Bradbury Is on Fire!” Salon.com. August 29, 2001. Available online. URL: http:// archive.salon.com/people/feature/2001/08/29/ bradbury/index.html. Accessed May 15, 2006. Hillegas, Mark R. The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Holman, C. Hugh. A Handbook to Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Odyssey Press, 1972. Indick, Ben F. The Drama of Ray Bradbury. Baltimore: T-K Graphics, 1977. Johnson, Wayne L. Ray Bradbury. New York: Frederick, 1980. McNelly, Willis E. “Ray Bradbury.” Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, edited by E. F. Blieler. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982. Mogen, David. Ray Bradbury. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Nolan, William F. The Ray Bradbury Companion. Detroit: Gale, 1975. “Ray Bradbury: Celebrating a Life of Wonder and Imagination.” 2001. HarperCollins. Available online. URL: http://www.raybradbury.com. Accessed May 15, 2006. “Ray Bradbury Online.” 2001. Space Age City. Available online. URL: http://www.spaceagecity.com/ bradbury/. Accessed May 15, 2006. Schwenger, Peter, and John Whittier Treat. “America’s Hiroshima, Hiroshima’s America.” Boundary 2 21, no. 1 (1994): 233–253. Slusser, George Edgar. The Bradbury Chronicles. San Bernardino. Calif.: Borgo Press, 1977. Toupence, William F. Ray. Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UNI Research Press, 1984. Wands, D. C. “Fantastic Fiction: Ray Bradbury.” FantasticFiction.co.uk. May 29, 2006. Available online. URL: http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/b/raybradbury/. Accessed May 30, 2006. Weist, Jerry. Bradbury: An Illustrated Life: A Journey to Far Metaphor. New York: Morrow, 2002. Weller, Sam. The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. New York: William Morrow, 2005.

Elisa Levine

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) Art hurts. Art urges voyages—and it is easier to stay at home. (A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing, 1975)

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After graduating with an associate degree in literature and arts from Wilson Junior College (1936), Brooks worked as a domestic and as a secretary in several offices. Later, she drew upon these experiences in Maud Martha (1953) and In the Mecca (1968)—before she served as publicity director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s) Youth Council in Chicago. She married Henry Lowington Blakely II on September 17, 1939, and gave birth to two children: a son, Henry L. Blakely III (1940), and a daughter, Nora (1951). In 1941 Gwendolyn and Henry attended a poetry class at the South Side Community Arts Center, a formative experience during which she sketched many of the early poems that would make her famous. During this time she lived in Chicago’s “kitchenette buildings,” cramped, often-unsanitary apartments that provided the setting for her fi rst collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1954). This fi rst collection, named for the segregated Douglas community area on the South Side of Chicago, introduced many of the themes that would occupy Brooks for the fi rst half of her career. These include the search for dignity and happiness in a society often blind to such basic needs, the reality of racism and poverty in America, life in urban America, the plight of underprivileged black women, mother love, and the trauma of world war. As B. J. Bolden describes, “The compilation of forty-one poems forms a collage of racism, sexism, and classicism of America in

he African-American poet, novelist, and autobiographer Gwendolyn Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, at her grandmother’s house. Soon after her birth, her parents, David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks, moved to Chicago, the city that became Gwendolyn Brooks’s home and source of poetic inspiration. David, a janitor and housepainter, and Keziah, a former schoolteacher, read to Gwendolyn at an early age, instilling in her a love of words and music and an appreciation for the sound of language: the rhythms and cadences she wove masterfully throughout her life as a poet and teacher. She began writing poetry at age seven; by 13 she had published her fi rst poem, “Eventide,” in American Childhood magazine. In addition to the support she received from her parents, she was encouraged by James Weldon Johnson, to whom she had written, and by Langston Hughes, whom she met at the Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago. After Brooks sent Johnson some of her poems, he recommended that she read modern(ist) poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and e. e. cummings. Hughes sight-read her poetry in person, told her she had talent, encouraged her to keep writing, and later wrote about her potential in his newspaper column. By 16 Brooks had already assembled an impressive poetry portfolio of more than 75 published poems that had appeared in Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago’s black population.

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its illumination of the people who strive to survive in Bronzeville. In the background of her portraits looms the shadow of the American struggle to come to grips with its diverse population by entrapping the Black community in a stagnant environment” (14). The collection is divided into three sections. The fi rst section focuses on the community of poor blacks she knew and with whom she lived. The second section consists of five portraits, including the long poem (159 lines) “Sunday of Satin-Legs Smith,” which Brooks wrote at Richard Wright’s suggestion. The third and final section is a 12-sonnet sequence titled “Gay Chaps at the Bar” based on reflections about World War II by men who fought in the war, which she dedicated to her brother, “Staff Sergeant Raymond Brooks and every other soldier.” Critics praised A Street in Bronzeville. With a national reputation and a critically acclaimed book, Brooks received a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters the following year (1946), as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship that year and then another Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. In 1950 Brooks received the Pulitzer Prize, the fi rst African American to do so, for her second collection of poetry, Annie Allen (1949), which describes the life of its title character in four parts: “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad,” “Appendix to the Anniad,” and “The Womanhood.” Unlike A Street in Bronzeville with its vignettes and multiple-character focus, Annie Allen is a narrative in verse, often experimental, as in the “sonnet-ballads” Brooks fashions from colloquial speech and formal diction that tell of one black girl’s development and struggles with poverty and racial identity, a story of dreams deferred and the trials of tenement life. Brooks details her heroine’s birth, adolescence, search for self-understanding and love, sacrifices during time of war, betrayal, and growth into womanhood, when she emerges fi nally alone yet determined and self-reliant and calls out with maturity, wisdom, and hope: “Rise. / Let us combine.” [and] “Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.” Brooks followed Annie Allen with Maud Martha (1953), a largely autobiographical novel dealing with

racism, sexism, and the identity of an African-American woman before, during, and after World War II. Rounding out Brooks’s early works is The Bean Eaters (1960), a collection of poems that, although rooted in similar experiences as her previous works, explores civil rights issues, which were becoming increasingly important to Brooks, and experiments with free verse. In the collection Brooks deals with such charged issues as the integration of the Little Rock, Arkansas, school system and the lynching of 14-yearold Emmett Till. But, true to her faithfulness to Chicago, Brooks also continued to write about blacks in the North. As Arthur P. Davis describes, Brooks’s works through The Bean Eaters are set in a distinct locale, Bronzeville, both a realistic and an imagined space that captures much about the northern black experience: The scene on which Miss Brooks places her characters is always “a street in Bronzeville,” and Bronzeville is not just the Southside of Chicago. It is also Harlem, South Philadelphia, and every other black ghetto in the North. Life in these various Bronzeville streets is seldom gay or happy or satisfying. The Bronzeville world is a world of run-down tenements, or funeral homes, or beauty parlors, of old roomers growing older without graciousness, or “cool” young hoodlums headed for trouble, of young girls having abortions. Unlike the South, it is not a place of racial violence, but in other respects it is worse than the South. It is a drab, impersonalized “corner” of the metropolitan area into which the Negro— rootless and alone—has been pushed. (CLA Journal 90–92)

Like the city dwellers in James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), Brooks’s early characters are ordinary people, many of whom are ghetto dwellers entrapped by social, economic, and racial forces they can neither control nor understand. And, as with Joyce’s paralyzed Dubliners, Brooks characters ultimately fail, making choices and acting in ways, often out of fear and insecurity, that perpetuate their suffering.

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During this period of Brooks’s enormously productive creative life, she also taught creative writing at numerous institutions, including Columbia College (Chicago), Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Wisconsin. While in teaching she inspired others to learn, express, and grow, she herself was inspired by key African-American writers and activists when she attended the Second Black Writer’s Conference at Fisk University, where, among others, she met Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), Ron Milner, and Haki R. Madhubuti (formerly Don L. Lee). Brooks was impressed by these key figures’ vigorous and sometimes aggressive action in pursuing social and political ends, their fight for civil rights, and their leadership in the black nationalist movement, a movement in the 1960s and early 1970s that focused on cultivating a sense of identity among people of African ancestry. With cries such as “Black Power” and “Black is beautiful,” the black nationalist leaders cultivated a sense of pride. Although the movement was complex and often controversial, it emphasized the need for the cultural, political, and economic independence of African Americans, and it called for action, all of which appealed to the politically aware and socially concerned Brooks. Not surprisingly, her next work, In the Mecca (1968), a collection of poems largely dealing with events in a Chicago tenement building in which she worked as a young woman called “Mecca,” focused on experiences and language unique to black Americans. Here Brooks uses intricate phrasings, rhymes, shifting tones, eccentric characters, fallen black heroes Medgar Evars and M ALCOLM X, and a local street gang, the Blackstone Rangers. These poems describe abject poverty, argue for social equality, record tragic deaths, and lament the loss of AfricanAmerican spirituality. As George Kent describes, “Gwendolyn spends little time evoking the Mecca Building, the former showplace that had become a slum and served as the setting for her framework and related stories. She focuses instead upon what is happening to the holiness of people’s souls in a corrupting universe” (211–212). For Muslims, Mecca signifies paradise, heaven on earth. Thus, the title of the collection, which depicted a tenement about as far from heaven on earth as could be imagined, also

enshrined the beauty and sacredness of black culture. In 1968 Brooks succeeded Carl Sandburg as the poet laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death in 2000. She used this position to encourage young writers and fight for the black cause. Influenced by activists and young African-American voices as well as becoming increasingly attuned to the civil rights struggle, Brooks continued writing about the black experience. But to say that she wrote explicitly about the African-American plight later in her career misses the point that her subject had always been the black experience. Her next collection, Riot (1969), was written during and inspired by the chaotic, incendiary riots following the assassination of M ARTIN LUTHER K ING, JR. This collection also marked her move to Broadside Press, a black Detroit press operated by Dudley Randall, a close friend. Brooks continued in this vein, publishing over 20 works and writing children’s books, an autobiography in two parts, advice to young poets, and even a collection of poems, the Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986), dealing with apartheid in South Africa. From 1985 until 1986, Brooks served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. She received over 50 honorary doctoral degrees, the 1988 Essence Literary Award, was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, became the first black woman to receive the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal, and received a Senior Fellowship in Literature grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Taken together, Brooks’s poems about ordinary people produce a vivid and complex picture of America’s poor, with poverty both sign and symbol of racism and injustice. The poor are uneducated (or undereducated), victimized by racism and crime, trapped by society and their own inadequacies. The poet-narrator’s attitude toward them is one of wistful sympathy; she herself is a part of the life she describes.

“kitchenette building” (1945) The first poem from A Street in Bronzeville, “kitchenette building,” describes life in a tenement build-

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ing, where five apartments share one bathroom, and the cramped spaces and a destitute life leave little time to hope and dream. Here Brooks portrays life in the 1930s and 1940s, when those fleeing the Jim Crow South to economic freedom in the North were desperate for housing. To accommodate the population increase and to maintain a segregated Chicago, old mansions on Chicago’s South Side were transformed into tenement buildings, with large houses divided into tiny compartments. Here the dwellers face disillusionment: a journey made to freedom whose end lies in low-income, segregated housing. What was to be a possibility for a new life becomes a return to lesser-than status in a northern city, where unspoken, unwritten ideas about segregation dictate that blacks live in squalor. The first poem in the sequence is a central one because it asks what the fate of a dream would be in this world. Would it penetrate the “onion fumes” of garbage and “fried potatoes”? This question hangs in the air like the smell of rotting garbage and grease; it is a haunting question that seems nearly impossible to answer. For the Bronzeville dwellers live in a world of limitations in which any higher aspirations must be put aside for immediate needs: “rent,” “feeding a wife,” and “satisfying a man.” The poem’s dream appears as “white and violet,” colors that convey lightness, intransigence, and the irony of privilege and its lack in Bronzeville. As the speaker, in this case the collective “we” voice of the Bronzeville dwellers, wonders whether a dream could take flight or even sing to those who may or may not be able to entertain a message the dream might carry, a terse response follows: “We wonder.” But this moment of reveille is short-lived, engulfed by the stark realities of the tenement building, which press upon all who dwell there and confine their sense of hope to life’s basic needs, those things, like lukewarm water, that still necessitate patience, resignation. This portrait of urban city life, while forming a bitter social commentary and capturing the poignancy of dashed dreams, still shows human beings making their way in a world of unfathomable odds, a people determined to survive. Regardless of the way we read the poem, “kitchenette building” records the plight of urban black life prior to the civil rights

era. This poem enshrines that time when hope for a future is deferred by the reality of the present, a time when “freedom” was defi ned according to a set of social precepts dictated by a dominant white culture, which, despite its postwar prosperity and ability to live the American dream, literally has not made space for black America.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Locate Richard Wright’s documentary book 12 Million Black Voices (1941), which contains descriptions of the plight of urban blacks after the northern migration. Note how, on pages 105–110, Wright depicts kitchenette life: “The kitchenette blights the personalities of our growing children, disorganizes them, blinds them to hope, creates problems whose effects can be traced in the characters of its child victims for years afterwards.” With this portrayal of kitchenette life in mind, compare what the two have to say about urban youth. Are their thoughts complementary, or do they form two distinctly different visions of childhood? Finally, write a well-developed essay that explores childhood in the kitchenette buildings from the perspective of each author. 2. Read Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred”(anonlineversioncanbelocatedathttp:// www.americanpoems.com/poets/LangstonHughes/2381). First analyze “kitchenette building” as a response to Hughes’s poem, keeping in mind what both have to say about dreams. Next, think about setting. How are the settings of the two poems similar? With both the theme of dreams and the setting of each poem in mind, write a well-developed essay that deals with the urban black experience. 3. Read Rita Dove’s “Teach Us to Number Our Days” (1980), from her first full-length volume, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980). Explore the way both Brooks’s poem and “Teach Us to Number Our Days” deal with social inequality and dreams. After you consider what both poets have to say, write a well-developed essay on the meaning of dreams and the art of social critique in both poems.

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“the mother” (1945) “The mother” is a 35-line poem in free verse: It has no regular meter or line length and relies on natural speech rhythms and the varying of stressed and unstressed syllables. The irregular meter helps to recreate the mind of the divided mother: the agitated, unsettled mind of a woman still trying to make sense of decisions she has made. Yet Brooks does include full rhymes and some slant rhymes at the end of lines that help to unify the work and cause the last sound and image in the line to remain in the reader’s ear. Although the poem deals with difficult subject matter, abortion, the poem is carefully crafted so that it achieves a lyrical sound. Immediately the first line assaults the reader, leaving no doubt about the poem’s subject, but the attitude that the speaker takes toward the subject is not easily discerned, for many of the lines ring with an ambiguous, often contradictory tone. In fact, the title itself is ironic; the woman speaking, although she has been pregnant, has not birthed a child, yet she implores the reader at the end of the poem, despite the difficult decisions she has made and the accompanying guilt she has expressed, to believe that she has loved all of the children she has given up. The mother is divided: On the one hand, she affirms the decisions she has made; on the other hand, she questions those same decisions, groping for words to express the dichotomous feelings she harbors, laboring to use language to express how “the truth is to be said.” The mother’s memory and imagination link her to what she has lost, leading her to conjure the things her children might have done and to speak directly to her aborted children throughout the poem. In this way, the poem has a dreamlike quality, one in which the mother grapples with reality but also fantasizes about what might have been, creating an overall nostalgic tone that is suffused with pathos, that strange artistic quality that evokes tenderness, pity, and sorrow all at once. As in many of the other poems in A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Brooks deals with children, the innocent who suffer in an adult world and who grapple for some place in a harsh space where they are often marginalized. Yet, despite Brooks’s interest in children and her

compassion for their plight, “the mother” focuses on the consciousness of the would-be child bearer, the one who has elected not to carry children into a bleak world. The lost children stand as reminders of the harshness of the impoverished world the speaker inhabits; the mother expresses concern for those who might have been introduced into a cruel world. Richard Wright, author of Native Son and proponent of Brooks’s poetry, read “the mother” and thought the subject inappropriate for A Street in Bronzeville. While Wright may have been correct about the climate of the times, it is difficult to imagine a more effective poem: one that breaks with our expectations and presents a portrait, drawn from the harsh reality of street life, of a divided woman. By presenting in a stark, realistic manner, a woman who has aborted her children, Brooks offers a moving depiction of the destitute urban woman. Even though this woman regrets her actions, she keeps the lost alive in her memory, weighing what might have been, what she believes, what she knows, what she struggles with, what she has lost, and what does not make sense to her. Thus, the mother is a complex Brooks character, a woman who inhabits a difficult world, where day-to-day survival necessitates choosing from a host of real possibilities that defy any stereotype, any abstract, idealized notion of what it means to be human.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Keeping in mind that Richard Wright thought “the mother” was inappropriate for publication, evaluate Brooks’s treatment of abortion in the poem. Why might the subject matter be difficult for readers in the mid-1940s? 2. Dealing again with Wright’s objection, think about the purpose of art and evaluate Wright’s assessment of Brooks in light of his controversial novel about an enraged black man (Native Son, 1940) published several years before Brooks’s poem appeared in print. What do Wright’s and Brooks’s works have in common? What purpose does art serve for both artists? After learning about and/or reading Native Son, do you feel that Wright was being hypocritical in his critique? Why or why not?

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3. Commenting on “the mother,” Brooks says, “Hardly your crowned and praised and ‘customary’ Mother; but a Mother not unfamiliar, decides that she, rather than her World, will kill her children. The decision is not nice, not simple, and the emotional consequences are neither nice nor simple” (Brooks, Report from Part One, 184). Thinking about this quote, compare Brooks’s poem about a mother who kills her children with Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel about a mother who kills her child rather than have it return to slavery. Why do both authors deal with these sensitive subjects? 4. Read Brooks’s two poems “People who have no children can be hard” and “What shall I give my children? who are poor,” both of which can be found in the “The Womanhood” section of Annie Allen (these two poems can also be found in Selected Poems). With these two poems and “the mother” in mind, write a well-developed essay on motherhood in Brooks’s poetry, analyzing what she says about mothers in general and about black mothers specifically.

“A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” (1960) In her well-known poem from her 1960 collection The Bean Eaters, Brooks bases “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” on a horrific historical event: the highly publicized lynching of a 14-yearold black youngster, Emmett Till. While originally born in Mississippi, Till moved to Chicago when he was two years old. In 1955, Till and his cousin traveled to Money, Mississippi, to stay with Till’s great-uncle, Moses Wright. Till’s mother was well aware of the racial tension in the South, especially after the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, to end segregation in public schools. It was a landmark case that overturned the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which had previously allowed U.S. states and localities to mandate racial segregation.

Thus, Till’s mother had cautioned him about this racially charged area of Mississippi. On August 24, 1955, Emmett Till, entered Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in the town of Money, Mississippi. Till exited the store; soon afterward, so did Carolyn Bryant, the store owner’s wife. Although it is not clear exactly what transpired (sources vary), the official Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) report says that Till whistled at Bryant, who told her husband of the event several days later after he returned from a trip. According to the FBI report, which can be found at http://foia.fbi.gov/till/till.pdf: “On August 28, 1955, at approximately 2:30 a.m., Roy Bryant (Carolyn Bryant’s husband), J. W. Milam and at least one other person appeared at the home of Mose Wright, Till’s great uncle, looking for the boy who had ‘done the talking’ in Money and abducted Till from the home.” The men then drove to a plantation, where they beat him, shot him in the head, tied a cotton gin fan around his neck, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River. His body was recovered on August 31, 1955. This nationally reported event fueled the growing Civil Rights movement. On May 10, 2004, the Justice Department reopened the case to determine whether anyone else was liable. While the grand jury found no credible evidence that others were involved and decided not to press charges against Carolyn Bryant, the report provided some sense of closure to a case studied and written about for over 50 years. In addition to Brooks’s work, which memorializes the event, the case inspired many poignant artworks, including the fi rst play by the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, poems by Langston Hughes and Audre Lorde, and a song by Bob Dylan called “The Death of Emmett Till.” Told through the point of view of Carolyn Bryant, the white mother whose husband had just been acquitted of the murder of Emmett Till, the poem describes Bryant as she burns bacon, her mind occupied with the horrific murder and imagining the story in the form of a ballad. As with lyric poetry and fairy tales, she wants the story to conform to conventions, to fit her worldview and absolve her of guilt. Thus, she thinks of herself as “The milk-white maid” pursued by “the Dark Villain” (Till) and ultimately rescued by “the Fine Prince,” figures that might,

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from her dim recollection, appear in a ballad. But the poet is careful to create an ironic distance, noting that she does not even remember what a ballad is. These thoughts, interrupted by the burning of bacon, soon leave her as she dwells on the boy’s age and innocence: The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified When the Dark villain was a blackish child Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty, And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder Of its infant success.

As an image of Till rises to meet her, the fairy tale she has woven disintegrates, leaving her with “no thread capable of the necessary Sew-work.” Her meditation on the events, however, ends with hatred not for the boy who has been killed, but for her husband. The kiss he gives her is not of love but of death: “But his mouth would not go away and neither would the / Decapitated exclamation points in the Other Woman’s eyes.” The Other Woman is the mother of Emmett Till, and her presence increases the guilt of the Mississippi mother. As the poem ends, her husband pulls her close to kiss her, and she does nothing. Unlike the moment with Till, she just stands there as a hatred for her husband bursts “into glorious flower.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” is a long and unusual title for a long poem. In the poem, details from ordinary life, northern and southern, are interspersed with meditations on the perils of growing up black in America. What holds the poem together? 2. Compare “A Bronzeville Mother” with other poems from The Bean Eaters, such as “The Last Quatrain of Emmett Till,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” and the “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed.” As with a “Bronzeville Mother,” these poems are rooted in the history of racism, violence—especially lynch-

ing—and discrimination. Taken together, what stance do these different poetic voices form? What do they have to say about concrete moments in history? Finally, write a well-documented research paper that explores the historical events Brooks’s poems enshrine. 3. Research the history of lynching by visiting , which contains photographs and postcards of lynching in America. How does Brooks’s poem respond to such atrocities? What value lies in reflecting on a lynching story from a white perspective? How does this affect the tone of the poem? 4. Why do the lines grow briefer at the very end? What effect does this create, and why is this effect significant? 5. Compare this poem with Brooks’s poem “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” which reflects on Till’s mother. Why does Brooks dedicate so much space to Carolyn Bryant and so little to Till’s mother? Consider the style differences between the two poems. Why are these differences important, and how do they affect meaning?

“The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” (1960) To understand this poem’s significance, it is important to understand the cultural context about which Brooks is writing, one alluded to in the poem’s epigraph, “Fall, 1957.” Brooks’s poem deals with what is called “the Little Rock Nine” or “the Little Rock crisis,” a landmark moment in the history of civil rights in America. After the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional and called for the desegregation of American public schools, the NAACP worked to register students in all-white schools in the South. The NAACP supported nine African-American students, who, on September 4, 1957, were blocked from entering Little Rock Central High School by the Arkansas National Guard under orders of the

Gwendolyn Brooks 83

then-governor, Orval Faubus. President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard, demanded that they return to their armories, and sent the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the federal court order. In what most believe to be a political decision, Faubus closed Little Rock high schools for the 1958–59 school year. The first-person narrator of the poem, a reporter from the Chicago Defender, a paper often read by blacks who migrated from the South and wanted to know about race relations there, is first struck by how unremarkable the people of Little Rock are. They bear children, “comb and part their hair, “watch want ads,” and repair their homes. They sing hymns, which they have rehearsed well and drink lemon teas, eat Lorna Doones, celebrate Christmas, play baseball, have open air concerts, love, show loving kindness to one another, and answer their phones out of courtesy. All of these observations confuse the speaker, who is attempting to understand the people who have purportedly spread hatred. Here we see the poem’s complexity. As readers, we are asked to fi ll in many blanks, to interject the historical context, remember what has taken place, since we are privy to knowledge that the speaker does not have. This complex way of telling creates a sense of irony; the speaker spends most of the poem observing Little Rock’s normalcy and goodness, something that the reporter/speaker knows the Chicago Defender editor will not accept. So the imagined answer of the editor hangs in the air, “Why?” While the poem never provides an answer, it makes a radical shift in the last 10 lines, with the speaker reporting on the white mass of people who spit and throw rocks, garbage, and fruit, harassing the Little Rock Nine as they make their way to the school building and who, in the final lines, are associated with the crucified Christ. Thus, in the end, the reader is left with a jarring juxtaposition, an unresolved set of observations that still need to be processed, examined, and understood.

torical significance of the paper, Brooks’s role as a reporter, and her poem on the subject. 2. Visit the Web site for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. There you will find archival documents related to the “Little Rock School Integration Crisis”: http://www. eisenhower.archives.gov/dl/LittleRock/littlerockdocuments.html. Read both the personal correspondence there as well as the official press releases. Finally, write a well-developed essay that assesses Eisenhower’s role in the integration of the Little Rock school system. What struggles did Eisenhower face? How did his course of action affect civil rights history? As a point of interest, you also may want to explore the correspondence between Jackie Robinson and President Eisenhower, a famous exchange between the fi rst African-American professional baseball player of the modern era in 1957 and the then-president of the United States. 3. Analyze the final lines of Brooks’s poem: “The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.” / “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.” Here Brooks makes a comparison with the crucifixion of Jesus. With these final lines in mind, trace the religious imagery in the poem. Why does Brooks fill the poem with such images? What is their effect? How does this imagery cast the African Americans known as the Little Rock Nine? How do both reflect a shift in Brooks’s perspective toward race relations in America? 4. Compare this poem with Countee Cullen’s sonnet “Christ Recrucified,” noting how each poem deals with race and religion. How do the Christ images in both poems function, and to whom do they refer? Do the poems employ these images ironically? Why or why not?

For Discussion or Writing

A poem that appeals as much to sound as sight, “We Real Cool” is the most anthologized of Brooks’s poetry, an indication of both the poem’s immediacy and its complexity: the layers of meaning one encounters when pondering just eight short lines. In

1. Visit the Chicago Defender homepage, http:// www.chicagodefender.com/, and learn about its history. Take what you learn about the paper and apply it to Brooks’s poem, thinking about the his-

“We Real Cool” (1960)

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a 1961 interview with Studs Terkel, Brooks spoke about the poem’s rhythm and the way the poem should be read: Well, ideally, for myself at any rate, the “we” is supposed to be almost an attachment to the word that precedes it, and it’s to indicate a sort of lostness and a sort of bewildered clutch at identity, a sort of—a little cry: we. And yet this “we” can’t come and stand up straight and tall. It’s not in . . . . These pool players feel that way, although I’m sure that most of them wouldn’t be able to express it. (“A Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks,” Gayles 9)

Here we see Brooks emphasizing the oral aspects of the poem and commenting upon the pool players’ identity: how the boys are revealed through careful word choices and a thoughtful reading, with the personality of the players created in the way the poem is intoned. While what is often stressed is the rhythm of the poem, which is, of course, significant in that it predates rap yet has raplike qualities, this poem also deals with the effects of segregation. Thus, rather than merely interpreting the boys in the poem as idle loafers, which is easy to do when such stereotypes fi ll the news and movies, the boys can be considered as representatives of the black community, those who have been denied membership in the greater society. As Bolden describes: “The Black men of Bronzeville are not to be taken merely as ‘pool players,’ but as metaphorically indicative of the long term effects of segregation on Black Americans who are entrapped within the confines of their own poverty-stricken communities and ostracized, based upon negative racial stereotypes of the dominant white society” (130). Here, as several critics have noted, we can find an overall consistency in Brooks’s works, which forms a continuum dealing with race, class, and gender issues. It is tempting to read this poem without interjecting cultural context, but when we consider the world in which these young men live, we find their own self-doubts, hesitations, and fears. In this sense, the poem speaks about collective identity, which, on the one hand, is representative of the condition of

urban segregation. On the other hand, what these players lack is a sense of self, the sort of autonomous existence that would enable them to sustain themselves, find community, and act in the world.

For Discussion or Writing 1. When initially published, “We Real Cool” was banned in some West Virginia and Mississippi schools because the word jazz had sexual connotations. Brooks responded to this claim with the following: I didn’t mean that at all. I meant that these young men would have wanted to challenge anything that was accepted by “proper” people, so I thought of something that is accepted by almost everybody, and that is summertime, the month of June. So these pool players, instead of paying customary respect to the loveliness of June—the flowers, the blue sky, honeyed weather—wanted instead to derange it, to scratch their hands in it as if it were a head of hair. This is what went through my head; that is what I meant. However, a space can be permitted for a sexual interpretation. Talking about different interpretations gives me a chance to say something I firmly believe—that poetry is for personal use. When you read a poem, you may not get out of it all the poet put into it, but you are different from the poet. You’re different from everybody else who is going to read the poem, so you should take from it what you need. Use it personally. (Howe and Fox, “A Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks,” Gayles 144)

With Brooks’s comments in mind, think about your fi rst reading of the poem. How did it differ from the thoughts Brooks gives here? Thinking on the differences between your initial understanding and your grasp of the poem now and about what Brooks says about the open nature of interpretation, write a well-developed essay that argues multiple ways to read the poem, the many ways readers can internalize this particu-

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lar poem without applying a certain context and without the author’s ideas. Evaluate these possible responses. Ultimately, weigh whether knowing what the poet intends is important or not. You might consider looking at Louise Rosenblatt’s work of literary criticism The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1978), which argues that readers transact with the poem, creating meaning along with the author. After reading Rosenblatt’s ideas, evaluate which critical approach you have been taking to interpreting literature and identify the approach you think is most productive. 2. You can hear Brooks reading the poem at Poets. org, the Web site published by the American Academy of Poets: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia. php/prmMID/15433. After hearing Brooks read, think about how her reading affects your understanding of the poem. What possible interpretations does Brooks’s reading invite? After considering these questions, write a well-developed essay that contrasts the experience of reading the poem silently with hearing the author reader her own work. After hearing her read, do you feel as free to interpret as you did before, or has her reading restricted what you feel you have to say? 3. Read Brooks’s “the preacher: ruminates behind the sermon,” which was also banned in a 1974 Virginia public school dispute and in Nebraska. Then, compare the two poems, looking for specific language or images that might be offensive. Can you see why others objected to the poems? Finally, identify what makes both poems unique and vital for understanding Brooks’s works and write a well-developed editorial that argues against censorship, using images and quotes from the poems. 4. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” and R ALPH ELLISON’s “Flying Home” all address social inequality and the difficulty of changing social status. After reading these works, read Jonathon Kozol’s Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, an indictment of the American school system. With Kozol’s ideas in mind, write a well-developed essay that ana-

lyzes these three literary works through Kozol’s modern sociological lens. What do these works reveal about American education? Finally, consider whether these three black authors’ insights still apply to public education in American today. 5. Read Brooks’s poem “The Lovers of the Poor” and then compare it with “We Real Cool.” What do the two poems have to say about social inequality, economic deprivation, segregation, and discrimination? With this questions in mind, craft a well-developed essay on the social ramifications of both works.

“Riot” (1969) Written just two years after Brooks heard black nationalists, including LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), speak, “Riot” is the title poem from a collection Brooks published in 1969 with a black press (Broadside). Opting not to publish with Harper and Row, who, no doubt, would have paid her more, Brooks went as far to donate the royalties from Riot to Broadside, which enabled the press to sell the collection for only one dollar per copy and to publish other black poets as well. As James D. Sullivan notes in “Killing John Cabot and Publishing Black: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Riot”, “With Riot, not only the poet, but also the publisher, the retailers (primarily African American–run businesses), and crucially the target market of presumed readers were black. The domination of the whole communicative process by African Americans greatly decreased the likelihood of anyone’s reading the poem through a lens of universal white humanism” (Winter 2002 African American Review). Thus, Brooks targeted a black audience with Riot, detailing, in three sections— “Riot, The Third Sermon on the Warpland, and An Aspect of Love, Alive in Ice and Fire”—a specific moment in the history of social inequality and unrest in America, a depiction of present turbulence, and a hopeful vision for future civil rights achievements. Written in street dialect and marking what many critics view as the beginning of Brooks’s overtly political writing, Riot, in many ways, is both a tribute to fallen civil rights leaders and a call to action,

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a call that echoed the civic unrest America knew in the late 1960s. In the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, assassination on April 4, 1968, protests erupted across America, including Brooks’s city, Chicago, which had been home to King in 1966 while he was working to understand the destitute life of South Side residents and the many racist institutions and corrupt practices still in force in the North. Riot, the collection, responds to the events following King’s assassination, taking its title from the King quote Brooks uses as the poem’s epigraph: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Importantly, this period marks a decided shift in Brooks’s writing, as Norris B. Clark, in his essay “Gwendolyn Brooks and a Black Aesthetic,” describes: Although she has always written poetry concerned with the black American experience, one that inheres the diversity and complexity of being black and especially being female, her poetics have primarily undergone thematic developments. Her emphasis has shifted from a private, internal, and exclusive assessment of the identity crises of twentieth-century persons to a communal, external, and inclusive assessment of the black experience. (Mootry and Smith, A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction 84)

To frame the historical moment of the late 1960s, Brooks returns to the past, evoking John Cabot, the Italian navigator and explorer commonly credited as one of the first early modern Europeans to land on the North American mainland, aboard the Matthew in 1497. Cabot becomes the ideal representative of human blindness, a racist, ethnocentric figure driven by his own desires who is responsible for the oppression of African Americans. Significantly, Brooks uses Cabot, one of the founders of the “New World,” to show the injustice of the new world before her: a society at odds with itself and forced to come to terms with injustice.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Learn about Amiri Baraka, one of the influential young poets at the Fisk conference that inspired Brooks, through a source, such as his Web site:

http://www.amiribaraka.com/. Notice especially his political statements and poems, which can be found under “Writings.” Next, read his poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” his poem dealing with the September 11 World Trade Center tragedy, which makes bold claims about the attacks and why they happened. While Baraka held the position of poet laureate of New Jersey, he was forced to relinquish that position because of the heated debate about this poem (to read Baraka’s response, visit: http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html). Next, compare the sentiments expressed in “Somebody Blew Up America” with “Riot.” What do the two have in common; where do they differ? Finally, assess, on the basis of your understanding of Brooks—especially as she describes race relations in “Riot”— whether she would have approved of the Baraka poem. Support everything you say with quotes from both poems. 2. In her poetry collection Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment (1967), Nikki Giovanni, a leader in the black poetry movement, captures the fervor over civil rights and the raw energy of the Black Power movement. Read several of the poems from this collection and then compare Giovanni’s vision of race relations in America with the vision Brooks proffers in “Riot.” Can you see how the two poets respond to the same historical situation? What makes both of their responses unique? What do they have in common; how do they differ? 3. While Brooks’s early poetry has garnered more critical attention and critics such as Harold Bloom argue that her earlier writing is her strongest, it is important to consider her later works from a cultural perspective, to assess her writing as reflecting the turbulence that followed the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. With this cultural context in mind, read another one of Brooks’s poems from her 1969 collection Riot, “The Third Sermon.” Then, think about this poem and “Riot,” analyzing what both have to say about the necessity of destruction for creation. Is Brooks condoning violence? Does she approve of or see the value in the civil rights riots that have

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taken place in Chicago and in other cities? With these questions in mind, craft a well-developed essay that weighs Brooks’s stance toward nonviolent protest versus revolutionary action, drawing upon these two poems to support everything you say.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON BROOKS AND HER WORK 1. What relationship is conveyed between Gwendolyn Brooks and her community—both the ethnic or racial community in which she grew up and the larger society encountered as an adult? How does the complexity of this relationship make Brooks’s poetry unique, distinctive? 2. Brooks’s work changed during the black arts movement of the 1960s. Using reliable Internet sites or an encyclopedia, such as the site maintained by Poets.org, http://www.poets.org/ viewmedia.php/prmMID/5647, research the black arts movement and the expression Black Power. What changes do you see in her poetry? How can her poetry be considered to represent the black arts movement? 3. What do Brooks’s poems suggest about the challenges of being a poet who deals with social and moral problems? How does Brooks’s poetry become an effective means for observing and teaching? 4. When asked whether African American is a substitute for the name blacks, Brooks replied: The current motion to make the phrase “African American” an official identification is cold and excluding. What of our Family Members in Ghana?—in Tanzania—in Kenya?—in Nigeria?—in South Africa?—in Brazil? Why are we pushing them out of consideration? (Melhem, Heroism in the New Black Poetry 32)

With Brooks’s ideas in mind, read a selection from The Near Johannesburg Boy (1986) and Winnie (1991). How does Brooks deal

with the condition of blacks around the globe, across the “diaspora”? Why is her representation of blacks in other lands significant? With this significance in mind, write an essay that stakes a claim and argues either for or against using the term African American. Be sure to consider the implications of the word and to quote Brooks’s poetry. 5. The experience of migration, of people settling far from their ancestral homelands, is obviously one of the subjects of Brooks’s poem “To the Diaspora” (1981). This subject is also explored in ROBERT H AYDEN’s “Middle Passage” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage.” With these three poems in mind, write a well-developed essay on the nature of black migration. Why is this experience so important to understanding black history and culture? What do these poems convey that history textbooks cannot about this painful experience so integral to black identity and the global African community? 6. To place Brooks in the context of the black nationalist movement, read The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Would Brooks agree with what Malcolm X argues about black identity? Write a well-developed essay that compares the two, quoting from Brooks’s poetry to support everything you say. You might consider also incorporating Brooks’s poem “Malcolm X.” 7. In Urban Rage in Bronzeville: Social Commentary in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945– 1960, B. J. Bolden argues: The period of 1945–1960 was one of confrontation with classical forms for Brooks. Her early canon supports the contention that her seeming compliance to conventional form, as in the sonnet and ballad, was really a subversive act of poetic redefi nition to articulate her views on a social climate for Black Americans. Brooks persistently defied conventional forms, meter, and rhyme with myriad modifications, divergences, variances and adaptations to mask her message of social commentary and render it more palatable for her early audience. (164)

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8.

9.

10.

11.

Write a well-developed research paper on Brooks’s early work, notably A Street in Bronzeville and Bean Eaters, noting what other critics have to say about this period in Brooks’s life. After reading other critics, evaluate Bolden’s claim, arguing for or against his stance, quoting Brooks’s poetry, and citing other critics. In Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women, Barbara Christian argues that Brooks’s novel Maud Martha is a groundbreaking work in which a black woman is portrayed “as an ordinary human being in all the wonder of her complexity” (239). Christian also notes the profound influence Maud Martha (1953) had on Paule Marshall, especially her novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). With the representation of black female in mind, read both works of literature, analyzing how black women characters are developed. Finally, write a well-developed essay that explores identity according to both authors. In your essay, cite as many parallels as you can between the two works, especially connections that deal with the black women protagonists. Both Gwendolyn Brooks, in A Street in Bronzeville, and Rita Dove, in Thomas Beulah, write about African-American communities, providing compelling portraits that explore the condition of African-American life in the 20th century. Read both collections, noting their similarities and differences. Finally, write a well-developed essay on the African-American experience as described in the works of these two Pulitzer Prize–winning black poets. In her depiction of black urban life, Brooks also observes faults of the black community. Read “The Ballad of Chocolate Marble” (1945) and “The Ballad of Pearl May Lee” (1945), both of which deal with skin color differences within the black community. What do these two poems tell us about prejudice within black society? Read chapter 1 (“Of Our Spiritual Strivings”) of W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, whose complete text can be found at http://etext. virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DubSoul. html. Note what DuBois says about “doubleconsciousness”:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

After reading and thinking about the DuBois chapter, analyze Brooks’s poem “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” with DuBois in mind. To what extent does Satin-Legs Smith embody DuBois’s idea of “double-consciousness”? With DuBois and Brooks in mind, write a well-developed essay on “double-consciousness” in “The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith.” 12. Read two other Brooks poems that can be viewed from the perspective of DuBois’s “double consciousness,” “Negro Hero” and “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” both of which depict black soldiers who fight wars on two fronts: World War II abroad and a race war at home. Demonstrate your understanding of DuBois’s ideas and the Brooks poems by writing a well-developed essay that interprets the poems as embodiments of DuBois’s ideas. As you do this, think about the value of applying DuBois’s ideas. How do these ideas illuminate our understanding of the Brooks poems? WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Bell-Scott, Patricia et al., eds. Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters. Boston: Beacon, 1991. Bolden, B. J. Urban Rage in Bronzeville: Social Commentary in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, 1945– 1960. Chicago: Third World Press, 1999. Brooks, Gwendolyn. A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing. Detroit: Broadside, 1975. ———. Report from Part One. Detroit: Broadside, 1972. Callahan, John F. “‘Essentially an Essential African’: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Awakening to Audi-

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ence.” North Dakota Quarterly 55, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 59–73. Christian, Barbara. “Afro-American Women Poets: A Historical Introduction.” In Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985. Davis, Arthur P. “The Black-and-Tan Motif in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.” CLA Journal 60. no. 2 (December 1962): 90–92, 97. ———. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900–1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Dawson, Emma W. “Vanishing Point: The Rejected Black Woman in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks.” Obsidian II 4, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 1–11. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950–1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Gayle, Addison, Jr. “Gwendolyn Brooks: Poet of the Whirlwind.” Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 79–87. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Doubleday, 1984. Gayles, Gloria Wade, ed. Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” Modern American Poetry. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/ brooks/brooks.htm. Accessed May 28, 2007. Hansell, William H. “The Uncommon Commonplace in the Early Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks.” College Language Association Journal 30, no. 3 (Mar 1987): 261–277. Horvath, Brooke K. “The Satisfactions of What’s Difficult in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Poetry.” American Literature 62, no. 4 (December 1990): 606–616. Hughes, Gertrude R. “Making It Really New: Hilda Doolittle, Gwendolyn Brooks, and the Feminist Potential of Modern Poetry.” American Quarterly 42, no. 3 (September 1990): 375–401. Jimoh, A. Yemisi. “Double Consciousness, Modernism and Womanist Themes in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘The Anniad.’” MELUS 23, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 167–187. Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

Kufrin, Joan. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” In Uncommon Women. Piscataway, N.J.: New Century Publishers, 1981, 35–51. Lindberg, Kathryne V. “Whose Canon? Gwendolyn Brooks: Founder at the Center of the ‘Margins.’” In Gendered Modernisms: American Women Poets and Their Readers, edited by Margaret Dickle and Thomas Travisano. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Loff, Jon N. “Gwendolyn Brooks: A Bibliography.” College Language Association Journal 17 (1973): 21–32. Madhubuti, Haki R., ed. Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks. Chicago: Third World Press, 1987. Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987. ———. Heroism in the New Black Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Miller, R. Baxter. Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Poetryfoundation.org. Available online. URL: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet. html?id=843. Accessed May 28, 2007. Shaw, Harry B. Gwendolyn Brooks. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Sullivan, James D. “Killing John Cabot and Publishing Black: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Riot.” African American Review 36, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 557–569. Tate, Claudia, ed. “Gwendolyn Brooks.” In Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Wright, Stephen Caldwell. The Chicago Collective: Poems for and Inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks. Sanford, Fla.: Christopher-Burghardt, 1990. ———.On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Blake Hobby

Truman Capote (1924–1984) Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. (The Dogs Bark)

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dissatisfied with their marriage almost immediately after Truman was born, and she began to see other men. With both parents chasing their desires, there was little time left for Truman, who, in his sixth year, was sent to live with Lillie Mae’s family in Monroeville. The young Truman’s time in Monroeville was formative. Living with his aunts, Capote befriended his next door neighbor, future novelist NELLE H ARPER LEE, and became especially close to his cousin, Miss Sook Faulk. Both of these Monroeville friends appear in Capote’s early fiction. By age five, Capote had taught himself to read and write, and by age 11 he had written and submitted “Old Mr. Busybody”—which he has described as a scandalous roman à clef—in a children’s short story contest sponsored by the Mobile Press Register (Inge 21). As Capote recounts, this was to be the first of many troubles caused by his blending of fact and fiction: “The first installment appeared one Sunday . . . Only somebody suddenly realized that I was serving up a local scandal as fiction, and the second installment never appeared. Naturally, I didn’t win a thing” (21). Despite this setback, Capote kept writing, and he started to send his stories to magazines and literary journals by the time he was 15. Already convinced that he would eventually become a famous writer, Capote’s persistence bore fruit two years later when he received acceptance letters for three of his short stories on the same day.

ovelist, short story writer, journalist, playwright, screenwriter, provocateur, and selfproclaimed father of the nonfiction novel, Truman Capote, originally Truman Streckfus Persons, was born on September 30, 1924, to Archulus (Arch) and Lillie Mae Persons in New Orleans, Louisiana. Arch, a 26-year-old drifter who periodically returned to their hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, sporting “an expensive LaSalle or Packard Phaeton when he had money, sponging off his friends when he was strapped,” married Lillie Mae when she was 17 (Clarke 5). After running out of money on their honeymoon and living with Lillie Mae’s cousins for a time, Arch sent for his pregnant wife after securing a sales job with a steamship company in New Orleans, all the while trying to convince her not to have an abortion. After Truman was born, Arch tried to supplement his salesman’s salary with a variety of schemes: managing a prize fighter, promoting variety acts, publishing magazines and syndicated columns, among others (9). Capote was never very close to Arch, despite his summertime steamboat adventures on the Mississippi with him. Capote later recalled tap-dancing for the passengers with noted jazz musician Louis Armstrong on one of these voyages. Despite these reunions, Capote described his father as untrustworthy, a man who made many promises but fulfi lled few of them. None of Arch’s half-baked get-rich schemes paid off, and Lillie Mae became

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By this time, Lillie Mae, remarried to a well-off Cuban businessman, Joe Capote, changed her first name to Nina and moved with Truman to live in New York—only after finding out that she was no longer capable of bearing children. As biographer Gerald Clarke notes, her wayward affections were very traumatic for the young Truman: “. . . after all the years, and after her all her battles to gain custody from Arch . . . she loved him and she did not love him; she wanted him and she did not want him; she was proud to be his mother and she was ashamed of him. Her feelings toward him oscillated between polar extremes, in other words, and from one day to another, sometimes from one hour to another, he could not predict how she would greet him” (Clarke 42). Such abuse would fuel not only Capote’s insatiable desire for fame and acceptance but his fascination with the life of his most famous protagonist and mass murderer, In Cold Blood’s Perry Smith. Truman’s unhappy home life affected his grades at the private schools his mother sent him to. After performing poorly at one school, Nina, who had always thought her son too effeminate, sent him to St. John’s Military Academy in Ossining, New York, where he was sexually abused by older, stronger boys (Clarke 45–46). When the Capotes relocated to Millbrook, Connecticut, Truman was then sent to Greenwich High School, where he was taken under the wing of his English teacher, Catherine Wood. With her guidance and advocacy, Truman began publishing stories in the school’s literary magazine. Three years later, the Capotes moved back to New York, and Truman finished his remaining year of high school at a private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A year later, with the World War II raging in the Pacific and across the Atlantic, Truman found work as a copyboy at the understaffed offices of the New Yorker. Though he did become friends with the office manager and was given a slight promotion to the art department, where he sorted cartoons, the atmosphere at the magazine was cold, secretive, and gossip-plagued. After a few years, Capote attended a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, where he introduced himself to the poet Robert Frost as an employee of the magazine. Later, when Truman was

perceived to be sneaking out of one of Frost’s poetry readings, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet took it as an insult from the magazine. The incident got Truman fired, and he proceeded to write full time with the financial support of his stepfather, Joe. Comparatively free from financial burden and already intimate with wealthy and affluent New Yorkers, Capote began writing short stories for Story, Harper’s Bazaar, and Mademoiselle. These included “My Side of the Matter,” “A Tree of Night,” and “Miriam,” the last of which caught the attention of an editor at Random House, who expressed interest in whatever Capote wrote next. Although since he left the New Yorker he had been working on a novel, which was to be called Summer Crossing (posthumously published in 2006), Capote soon abandoned the project and, two years later, completed his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. Published in 1948 with the help of his friend and fellow writer Carson McCullers, the book received mixed reviews from critics but benefitted from its risqué subject matter and its equally provocative dust jacket, which prominently featured a picture of Capote gazing at the camera in an attitude of seductive repose. Written in a southern gothic style, the novel is a semiautobiographical story of an effeminate 13-year-old, Joel, who is sent from New Orleans to his reclusive quadriplegic father’s rural Alabama plantation after his mother dies. Estranged from his father since birth, Joel befriends a transvestite named Randolph and Idabel, a tomboy who is loosely based on Capote’s Monroeville playmate Harper Lee. Capote then spent the next 10 years traveling Europe and elsewhere with his longtime partner and novelist Jack Dunphy. During this time, he published an astonishing variety of works, from travel narratives and journalism pieces for the New Yorker to original Hollywood screenplays, Broadway adaptations of his fiction, and, perhaps most significantly, an experimental journalistic travel narrative called The Muses Are Heard: An Account (1956) and the commercially successful novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958). The first, a literary and journalistic account of an American theatrical production performing in Russia during the cold war, appeared on the pages of the New

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Yorker before appearing in book form. The Muses Are Heard was Capote’s first conscious attempt to produce what he considered to be a new sort of writing, a “high” journalism that retains fidelity to facts while presenting them with all of the “fictional technical equipment” a novelist has at his or her disposal (Plimpton, “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel” 26). As Capote himself later wrote in Music for Chameleons, “The Muses Are Heard had set me to thinking on different lines altogether: I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry” (xiv). Capote began to designate this genre experiment as the “nonfiction novel,” a term whose paradoxical and contradictory nature has been the source of much critical debate (for an excellent analysis of this, see Heyn). On November 16, 1959, Capote came across a small notice in the New York Times entitled: “Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain.” Thus began Capote’s fiveyear obsession with the brutal, apparently motiveless murder of the Clutter family at the hands of Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith. With his longtime friend Nelle Harper Lee, Capote immediately traveled to the small middle-American farming community of Holcomb, Kansas, to gather information and conduct interviews for what was to become his most famous novel. During the course of his investigation of the crime’s mysterious causes and tragic consequences, Capote gained the trust of the criminals, the investigating officers, and many of Holcomb’s residents. Capote became especially close to Perry Smith, who entrusted his interviewer with all of his personal effects and journals before his death. What resulted from these researches was one of the most commercially successful novels the publishing industry had ever produced, and Capote’s words were again adapted for film in 1967. After becoming so intimate with two condemned men and watching their repeated appeals fail to save them from the noose, Capote ceased writing and busied himself with arranging what became known as the party of the decade, the famous Black and White Ball, the guest list for which was so illustrious it was published afterward in the New York

Times. This event, extravagant, public, and decadent, was to be representative of Capote’s life for the next decade. Though he often claimed to be working on a “masterwork” in the same “nonfiction novel” style as In Cold Blood, which he called Answered Prayers (posthumously published in 1987), his writing habits suffered from his increasing addiction to drugs, alcohol, fame, and the distractions of the jet-set lifestyle. When Capote finally did publish chapters from Answered Prayers in Esquire starting in 1975, he alienated many of his rich and famous friends, who recognizably appear in the chapters from his work in progress revealing personal and scandalous secrets. Like his “Old Mr. Busybody,” “nothing came of it:” Capote’s rich friends no longer wanted to socialize with an indiscrete gossipmonger, and his attempt to turn his life into a revealing piece of artful nonfiction was never completed. In the remaining years before his death in 1984, Capote struggled with substance abuse and continued to write, publishing a novella and collection of short pieces entitled Music for Chameleons: New Writing (1983). After becoming increasingly ill and despondent, Capote died of a drug overdose in the house of Joanne Carson, the second wife of comedian and talk show host Johnny Carson, on August 25, 1984. Though no one knows if he intended to commit suicide, Capote told Mrs. Carson not to call the paramedics. In 2005, Capote’s life and writings were introduced to a new generation of audiences with the success of Bennett Miller’s biographical film Capote, which focuses on the author’s time in Kansas researching In Cold Blood. Capote and his most successful novel are recognized for their sociological significance and for their influence on postwar American fiction and nonfiction.

In Cold Blood (1965) Constructed out of his investigation of the horrific Clutter family murders and the events surrounding the capture, incarceration, and execution of the two men responsible for them, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was first published in four installments by the New Yorker in late 1965. In Cold Blood is an episodic narrative broken into small chapters of vary-

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ing length—some are only a paragraph long, others relate many details in journalistic exposition—and divided into four parts: “The Last to See Them Alive,” “Persons Unknown,” “Answer,” and “The Corner.” The chapters are mostly chronological but are interspersed with lengthy flashbacks and intrusions of purportedly factual accounts, such as the psychological evaluations of Dick and Perry that are placed in the courtroom scene. Such techniques keep the reader’s interest in lieu of the desire for a revelatory and unexpected ending: Nearly all of Capote’s readers knew exactly what happened to the Clutter killers from reading numerous newspaper accounts. By presenting the story from different perspectives— the townspeople’s, the detectives’, the killers’, and the victims’—while adhering to the chronology of a chase, Capote keeps his narrative moving at a quick pace (especially if compared with a piece of conventional journalism). By slowly revealing the grotesque and shocking nature of the crime, and the equally grotesque childhood of the novel’s antihero, Perry Smith, Capote substitutes the full disclosure of every “journalistic” detail—the “why”—for the usual questions a novel might be said to answer—the “what” and the “who.” The literary protagonist Capote constructs out of his many interviews and records is a pitiable and tragic figure. Perhaps the most unexpected development in Capote’s narrative unveiling of journalistic facts is that Perry—who, we eventually learn, did all of the shooting—seems to be much less callous than his fellow murderer, Dick Hickock, whom he ironically scolds for his lapses of moral fortitude. Whether factually correct or not, Capote’s masterful characterization of Perry yields the most disturbing contradictions of the book. Cajoling his readers into empathizing with such a despicable character by vividly describing his childhood and demented dream life throughout the novel—a harrowing tale of poverty, abandonment, abuse, bad luck, and psychological degeneration—Capote forces us to confront and make sense of a killer’s mind. Capote tricks us into sympathizing with a mass murderer by carefully omitting the most disturbing details of the killings while also retaining the chronological arrangement of a quest narrative, of a detective story where the

culprit is not a person but the varied ingredients of a life plagued by frustration, disappointment, delusion, and a desire for righteous vengeance. And in many respects, Capote was well-equipped to write such a biography because of his own familiarity with adolescent distress: Both author and character had parents who drank too much, seemed always to be on the verge of walking out the door, and denied their children a loving environment in which they could flourish. Such similarities have provoked many critics to claim that Capote not only bended facts and imagined new ones in his supposedly nonfictional account but also partially wrote himself into Perry’s character. Regardless of this question (which, in all honesty, we can never answer if Capote followed through with his claim that he was going to destroy his notes), the result is affecting and disturbing. Like the citizens of Holcomb, who first looked within their community for the sinner, we as readers are forced to question our own motivations and sentiments after being seduced by Capote’s composite psychobiography of a cold-blooded murderer who has been a victim his entire life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Capote clearly empathized with Perry, if not Dick, in his deviation from the facts of the case, as Philip K. Tompkins notes in his fact-checking review of In Cold Blood (Malin 44–58). How might this deviation affect the reader’s view of the work and its significance? Does it make the book seem more sensational? Do Capote’s alterations of fact make In Cold Blood a more profound meditation on the darker side of human nature? Just as the townspeople of Holcomb looked within their community for the cause of disaster, turning inward to confront the sinful and evil side of their natures, so do readers when they are tempted to empathize with a murderer. Write a well-developed essay on the strategies Capote uses to seduce readers into empathizing with Smith. 2. Capote was often at odds with his contemporary novelists, especially those who were experimenting with creative nonfiction. New York Magazine, for instance, describes one of these critical volleys: “In 1980, Capote told an interviewer that while [the

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writer Norman] Mailer called Capote’s In Cold Blood a ‘failure of the imagination . . . now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I’m glad I was of some small service to him’” (http://nymag.com/arts/books/ features/26285/). Read Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer’s literary account of Gary Gilmore’s incarceration on death row. In light of Mailer’s comments and Capote’s response, write a welldeveloped essay that compares and contrasts each author’s treatment of such a similar subject. Do Mailer’s criticisms apply to his own attempt at a “true crime” novel? Does Mailer seem to take less liberties with the “truth” or fictionalize even more than Capote?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON CAPOTE AND HIS WORK 1. Many have remarked that Capote did more than empathize with Perry in In Cold Blood. In his sympathetic portrait of him, these critics claim that Capote read much of his own childhood troubles and familial conflicts into the life of his subject. Read a biography of Capote’s early life (for example, Gerald Clarke’s 1988 effort) and then write a well-developed essay that examines the similarities between Perry’s fictionalized biography and Capote’s early life. Do such claims make sense? Does Perry’s character evoke aspects of Capote’s own traumatic past? Should such issues be considered when evaluating In Cold Blood? Should we consider Capote a journalist or a novelist who drew from his own experiences to enrich his creative retelling of facts? 2. For a significantly different account of Capote’s time in Kansas, view the 2005 fi lm Capote, directed by Bennett Miller and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. How does Miller’s presentation of events differ? The time, for instance, after the Clutter murders and preceding Dick and Perry’s capture accounts for a large chunk of In Cold Blood. Capote, on the other hand, focuses attention on the period Capote spent interviewing the prisoners. Other points of divergence abound,

including the prominent role Capote’s friend and accomplished novelist Nelle Harper Lee had in the genesis of the novel. Write a well-developed essay that assesses these differences and explores the questions that they present. What difference is there, for instance, between the characterizations of Perry and Dick in the film? Are our sympathies for them diminished by Miller’s retelling? 3. In this passage from his 1976 essay “Pornoviolence,” Capote’s fellow “New Journalist” Tom Wolfe offers an explanation for the American public’s increasing fascination with violence, both real and imagined. According to Wolfe, stories like In Cold Blood betray a shift in taboos among a culture that is now partially immune to shock: Pornography cannot exist without certified taboo to violate. And today Lust, like the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins—Pride, Sloth, Envy, Greed, Anger, and Gluttony—is becoming a rather minor vice. The Seven Deadly Sins, after all, are only sins against the self. Theologically, the idea of Lust— well, the idea is that you seduce some poor girl from Akron, it is not a sin because you are ruining her, but because you are wasting your time and your energies and damaging your own spirit. This goes back to the old work ethic, when the idea was to keep every able-bodied man’s shoulder at the wheel. In an age of riches for all, the ethic becomes more nearly: Let him do anything he pleases, as long as he doesn’t get in my way. And if he does get in my way, or even if he doesn’t . . . well . . . we have new fantasies for that. Put hair on the walls. (Wolfe, Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, 185)

After reading “Pornoviolence,” write a welldeveloped essay that evaluates Wolfe’s comments and explores their relation to Capote’s novel. Is Wolfe justified in grouping In Cold Blood with titillating, shock-provoking tabloids such as the National Inquirer? Does our fascination with violence and “true crime” really signify a shifting moral consciousness?

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WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Capote, Truman. Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. New York: Random House, 1987. ———. Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories. New York: Random House, 1958. ———. The Dogs Bark: Public People and Private Places. New York: Random House, 1973. ———. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences. New York: Random House, 1966. ———. The Grass Harp. New York: Random House, 1951. ———. Music for Chameleons: New Writing. New York: Random House, 1983. ———. Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Random House, 1948. ———. Summer Crossing. New York: Random House, 2006. ———. The Thanksgiving Visitor. New York: Random House, 1968. ———. A Tree of Night, and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1949. Clarke, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. Garson, Helen S. Truman Capote. New York: Ungar, 1980. Heyne, Eric. “Toward a Theory of Literary Nonfiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 33, no. 3 (Autumn 1987): 479–490. Hollowell, John. Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Truman Capote Conversations. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

Kazin, Alfred. “Truman Capote and the Army of Wrongness.” Contemporaries. New York: Little, Brown, 1962. 250–254. Mailer, Norman. “Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room.” Advertisements for Myself. 1959. Reprint Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992, 463–473. Malin, Irving, ed. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968. Ozick, Cynthia. “Truman Capote Reconsidered.” 1973. Reprinted in Art and Ardor. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983, 80–89. Plimpton, George. “The Story Behind a Nonfiction Novel.” In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook, edited by Irving Malin, 25–43. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968. ———. Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Reed, Kenneth T. Truman Capote. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Tompkins, Philip K. “In Cold Fact.” In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: A Critical Handbook, edited by Irving Malin, 44–58. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968. Truman Capote: His Life and Works. (A Sponsored Archive). Available online. URL: http://www. nytimes.com/ads/capote/. Accessed July 21, 2009. Wolfe, Tom. “Pornoviolence.” Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967, 178–187.

John Becker

John Cheever (1912–1982) Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos (no less) and we can accomplish this only by the most vigilant exercise of choice. (“The Death of Justina”)

J

tioned, it is clear that Cheever felt neglected and ignored as a child, a formative experience that colored his view of the family and of the interpersonal roles family members play. Though many critics have noted the lack of didactic messages in Cheever’s stories, his works explore relevant political and social themes, such as the power relationships between men and women, the postwar American family, life in American suburbs (John Leonard called him “the Chekhov of the suburbs”), and the decline of moral values in modern society. Cheever’s Letters (1989) and Journals (1991) portray Cheever as a man consumed with guilt about his homosexual affairs. These important posthumously published sources invite readers to compare the social world and moral terrain of Cheever’s fiction with his life. Recently critical studies of his works have focused on Cheever’s bisexuality; the role his divided, often-at-oddswith-himself sexuality played in his works; and the social view of homosexuality his works present. Cheever claimed to have begun writing stories when he was six. His parents approved of his chosen vocation, only stipulating that he not work for fame or wealth. In addition to the role his parents had in his development as a writer, Cheever was greatly influenced by his older brother, Fred. Their relationship informed several stories, including “Good-by, My Brother,” “The Low-Boy,” “The Brothers,” and the novel Falconer. Cheever expressed the intensity of their relationship when he said, “The strongest

ohn William Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, on May 27, 1912. His father, Frederick Lincoln Cheever, was a member of an old seafaring family with a strong work ethic and concern for morality; his mother, Mary Lilely Cheever, was an Englishwoman who had emigrated with her parents. The facts of Cheever’s early life are sketchy, the result of confl icting reports he has provided and the fictionalization of his early life in his works. Cheever reports that his father, a successful shoe salesman, owned and operated a shoe factory until the 1929 stock market crash, after which Mary opened a gift shop and became the primary fi nancial provider. His father’s fi nancial ruin and his mother’s business success and subsequent blossoming independence deeply affected the young Cheever, as he stated in a 1977 interview with Ms. magazine: “I remained deeply disconcerted by the harm my mother’s working did to my father’s self-esteem.” While on one level these concerns are specific to Cheever’s family, on another level these fiscal and familial anxieties are common to the 21st century, especially in light of the second and third waves of feminism that arose after World War II and the continual struggle for women’s rights. Additionally Cheever was obsessed with a story his family told in which his father had invited an abortionist to dinner during his mother’s pregnancy, an incident Cheever included in both The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and Falconer (1977). While the veracity of such accounts may be ques-

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love—not the most exciting or the richest or the most brilliant—but the strongest love of my life was for my brother.” Other references to his brother occur in The Wapshot Chronicle, where the brothers Moses and Coverly leave home together just as Cheever and his brother left home and lived together in Boston. While family dynamics helped shape Cheever’s fiction, so did his childhood in Quincy, Massachusetts. Many of Cheever’s works deal with New England’s physical setting, moral obsessions, and social traditions, so much so that some critics have falsely classified him as a mere chronicler of modern manners. Despite his religious and moral upbringing, Cheever was expelled from Thayer Academy in South Braintree, Massachusetts, for bad behavior at the age of 17; this ended his schooling. Though this may seem out of place for a writer who has been called a moralist by a number of critics, Cheever attributed his difficulties to persistent emotional troubles, which stemmed from his parents’ apparent role reversal and the negative effects it had on his father. Furthermore, Cheever’s expulsion enabled him to explore his greatest ambition—becoming a serious writer; he published his first story, “Expelled,” in the New Republic in 1930, the year after he was dismissed from the academy. During the depression years Cheever worked in department stores and at various newspapers while he continued to write and publish. In the early 1930s, he published short stories in a number of magazines, including Atlantic, Colliers, and the Yale Review. Most importantly, however, he published “Brooklyn Rooming House” in the New Yorker (1935), beginning a lifelong relationship during which he published 121 of his 200 short stories in the magazine. After a short period of teaching composition at Barnard College, Cheever joined the army during World War II; in 1941 he married Mary M. Winternitz, whose father was the dean of the Yale Medical School. Mary and John Cheever, proud parents of three children, had a marriage Cheever called “extraordinary”; his relationship with Mary provided endless experiences and inspiration for his work. In 1943, two years after their marriage, Cheever published The Way Some People Live, a volume of 30

stories. Though Cheever uses the historical period of World War II as the situational context for eight of the stories, he focuses primarily on human relationships and human experiences, especially the transition from civilian to military life, rather than exploring actual war experiences. Cheever set some of the stories during the depression; such stories as “The Brothers” and “Publick House” closely resemble real events in Cheever’s life, though Cheever has stated that literary works should not be considered “cryptoautobiography.” Several critics also noted the stories’ similarities to Hemingway’s realistic style, including a heavy reliance on dialogue. While The Way Some People Live received favorable reviews, several critics found the stories stilted, attributing these aesthetic flaws to Cheever’s relationship with the New Yorker, which was thought to insist upon a stipulated formula. Conversely, other critics credit Cheever with establishing the standard story form for which the New Yorker is known. Simultaneously acknowledging and trying to dispel such criticisms, Cheever described his longtime editor at the New Yorker, Harold Ross, as a father figure and their partnership “a creative, destructive relationship from which I learned a great deal” (quoted in Grant 53). The magazine continued to publish his stories and allow him to refi ne his literary abilities while also sustaining him financially. In 1953, Cheever published his second short-story volume, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories, which, although it contained only 14 stories, was nearly as long as The Way Some People Live. Not only are these stories more fully developed narratives, but also they display a greater variety of settings and topics. In several of the stories, such as “Torch Song” and “The Enormous Radio,” Cheever’s more innovative narrative abilities and genre-bending talents emerge. Blending ordinary details with mythic transformations and seemingly magical, or possessed, objects, Cheever moves into a realm of extreme subjectivity, which is often cited as a hallmark of postmodern style. Here the mind’s inner reality and the world’s outer reality clash, setting off unexpected conflicts and drawing out the troubled and sometimes violent feelings that lie beneath his characters’ placid exte-

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riors. Though the volume received more favorable reviews than The Way Some People Live, some critics, such as Paul Pickrel, noted that Cheever’s stories were “too uniformly excellent,” another critical stance that seemed to relate to Cheever’s association with the New Yorker. Despite his success with short story collections, Cheever was determined to publish a novel. In 1957, he published The Wapshot Chronicle, a loosely connected, episodic novel that explores the family life of the Wapshots and their attempts to reconcile their domestic lives with those of their seafaring, adventure-seeking ancestors. The novel won the 1957 National Book Award for fiction, and, until the publication of Falconer, it was Cheever’s best-selling work. Many critics wrote respectfully of the work, but others connected the episodic form to his prior penchant for writing short stories. Though Cheever publicly denounced autobiographical remnants in the novel, many of the situations and familial relationships parallel his life; Cheever refused to publish the novel until after his mother’s death. Cheever published his third volume of short stories, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, in 1958. Because all of these stories take place in the suburb of Shady Hill, other similarities of theme, place, and time have prompted critics to call the work a novel. Many of the stories explore what happens when an individual undergoes a “temporary crisis” and deliberately tries to express himself or herself differently or to test a yet-untried freedom. The individual, however, is often drawn back into the situation that initially catalyzed the temporary conflict, despite its apparent restrictive or negative qualities. Some of his most widely reprinted stories are found in this volume, including “The Country Husband,” which won an O. Henry Memorial Award, and “The FiveForty-Eight,” which garnered the Benjamin Franklin Magazine Award. In 1961, Cheever published his fourth volume of short stories, Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, which met with mixed critical reception. This volume opens with “The Death of Justina” (quoted at the beginning of this entry), with its philosophical statements about art’s overcoming chaos; however, Cheever also

includes a false preface that states his growing frustration with many contemporary literary themes and his ideas about how literature can fail us. Many of these stories use America or Italy for their settings, though few of them contain the type of direct sociological and philosophical commentary found in “The Death of Justina.” This volume contains some of his darkest work. Frank J. Warnke called it “Cheever’s Inferno.” Such criticism reflects the shift in tone, plot, and character development of the stories; instead of fi nding characters who fulfi ll audience expectations, as in so many of his earlier works, the reader finds characters who exist in an absurd world, one in which they have little or no hope of fi nding a clear way of making meaning out of their lives. Three years later, Cheever published both his fifth volume of short stories, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964), and the sequel to his first novel, The Wapshot Scandal (1969). Diverging from his earlier work, many of the short stories focus on women, and some readers see The Brigadier and the Golf Widow as a preliminary exercise for The Wapshot Scandal. However, in keeping with a significant portion of his work, Cheever explores the themes of family dynamics, suburbia, and the delicate balance between the real and the surreal. In this volume, we also fi nd “The Swimmer,” a Kafkaesque tale of a young man’s attempt to realize his own heroic abilities and ultimate failure, which is the sole Cheever story ever to be made into a movie. Many of the stories also become darker and more sinister, further preparing his readers for his next novel, Bullet Park (1969), which is set in suburbia, where madness and death are ubiquitous and undeniable. In the years after publishing Bullet Park, Cheever fell into alcoholism, suffering from alcohol-related health problems and depression, and began having serious marital problems. Despite these personal problems, Cheever published his sixth volume of short stories, The World of Apples (1973); this volume was highly praised in literary circles, including the New York Times Book Review. Several critics noted the “transfiguring experience” of the work; for the first time Cheever allows the characters’ feelings, motivations, and morals to override the factual circumstances in which they find themselves, leaving the reader with

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an impression of optimism and rejuvenation. Under pressure from friends and family, he admitted himself to Smithers Alcohol Rehabilitation Center in 1975 and successfully gave up drinking before publishing his last complete novel, Falconer (1975). Falconer explores the issues of justice, alienation, and confinement through the protagonist’s experience in prison. The Stories of John Cheever (1978), a collection of his best short stories, earned Cheever an honorary doctorate from Harvard, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Edward McDowell Award. Cheever had begun working on a final novella, Oh What a Paradise It Seems when he died of cancer in 1982, leaving it unfinished. Nevertheless, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature just before his death. An author who has been compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne for his moral focus, to William Faulkner for his keen sense of place, and to Franz Kafka for his ability to blend subjective perception and reality, Cheever warrants recognition and further critical consideration. Despite his categorization as a moralist, Cheever’s lyrical style, narrative innovations, commitment to the human truths of everyday experience, and unfailing ability to imbue the mundane with mythic undertones make him one of the most careful observers of contemporary America, a gifted writer whose works have not received the attention they deserve.

“The Enormous Radio” (1947) “The Enormous Radio” first appeared in the New Yorker in 1947 and was subsequently published as part of Cheever’s second short story collection, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953). This story helped to solidify Cheever’s reputation as a modern literary innovator and to build his popularity; this is his most often reprinted work. As do many of his works, this relatively early story blends fantasy with real aspects of modern family life. “The Enormous Radio” takes place in the bustling, socially conscious suburbs of New York in the 1940s, presumably just after World War II, when Americans sought the economic prosperity, the

comforts of consumerism, and the social capital that wealth confers upon its possessors. The third-person omniscient narrator introduces the protagonists, Jim and Irene Westcott, with the blandness and inhuman description of a statistical analysis, using phrases like “[they] were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins” and “they went to the theater on an average of 10.3 times a year.” On the surface, Jim and Irene are average Americans who strive to improve their economic situation, to preserve their marriage, and to conform to all the social demands placed on them as upwardly mobile individuals. The one characteristic that separates the Westcotts from their neighbors and friends is the “interest they share in serious music,” which they try to conceal, apparently because this interest makes them somehow different from others. When the Westcotts’ old radio quits functioning, Jim purchases a new radio as a surprise for Irene. When she arrives home, Irene sees the new radio with its “malevolent green light” as an “aggressive intruder” among her hand-picked home furnishings. The radio functions properly for a few moments before interference—the sound of telephones ringing, electric razors buzzing, and vacuum cleaners humming—overwhelms the music. Here, Cheever demonstrates how modern life, with all its conveniences, intrudes upon even our most private spaces. The next day, Jim has the radio fixed. When the couple turns on the radio during dinner, instead of interference they unwittingly begin to overhear their neighbors’ troubles through the radio’s speakers. Though Jim has been too tired “to make even a pretense of sociability” and Irene has been consumed by disinterestedness during dinner, the opportunity to listen in on the trials and private lives of their neighbors piques their curiosity, and the couple spends the evening hours in front of the radio until they are “weak with laughter.” At this point, it is clear that Jim and Irene’s discussions rarely venture outside the self-deluded, safe conversations of a couple married for a long time. In contrast, the radio broadcasts the very volatile and emotional conversations of their

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neighbors, which eventually force Irene to acknowledge how little she really knows and understands about her relationship with Jim. As the story progresses, Irene becomes obsessed with the radio conversations. The narrator never describes Irene’s putting the kids to bed or kissing Jim as he heads off to work; instead, we see Irene’s leaving a luncheon early, wondering what secrets her lunch date is concealing, only to go home to listen in on her neighbors. When she and Jim attend a dinner party that night, Irene is again tormented by her suspicions about the private lives of others as she stares at the dinner guests with “an intensity for which she would have punished her children.” Finally, Irene’s obsession with her neighbors’ lives via the radio drives her to begin to question her relationship with Jim. She begins to wonder whether they too live “sordid” lives, full of passions and pain that they try to hide from one another and, in turn, that they both refuse to acknowledge, choosing instead to measure the worth and value of their lives against only the social and economic situations of their friends and neighbors. In the last scene, Jim berates Irene for her spending, which is also the topic of many of the radio conversations, even blaming her for purchasing the radio. He goes on to list Irene’s past misdeeds: “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 Howland’s life miserable, and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist? I’ll never forget how cool you were.” Up to this point, the episodic nature of the story and the narrator’s choice of details have prevented us, as readers, from seeing how Jim and Irene interact. Most of the reported conversations revolve around relatively trivial matters unless, of course, the conversations are heard over the strange radio. Several critics have noted how this story relates to the Eden story in the Bible, with the radio bestowing a form of new knowledge upon Irene, allowing her to see her everyday life in a new way that she never considered before. The radio, whether magical or possessed or simply malfunctioning, changes her view of the world, and she becomes nervous and preoccupied with the semblance of her own morality and her relationship with Jim.

In keeping with his tendency to blend fantasy and reality, Cheever’s story concludes as Irene wants to hear comforting words over the radio after her argument with Jim; instead, she hears a regular news broadcast: “An early morning railroad disaster . . . killed twentynine people. . . . The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine.” This broadcast serves to ground the story in the world, where the radio, a real object, changes the way that Irene has naively seen life in her subjective reality. Her self-constructed world’s facade of probity and moral conformity is forever cracked, and through this crack, Irene sees the ugliness, uncertainty, and self-absorption that lie beneath the smooth surface of social interaction and even the intimate relationship she shares with Jim.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read several literary works that blend fiction and the fantastic, works we often refer to as magical realism. Good examples include Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “The Circular Ruins.” Finally, write a well-developed essay that defi nes magical realism, drawing upon Cheever and other magical realism writers. 2. Several critics have noticed the similarities between “The Enormous Radio” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Both stories blend fantasy and reality, and both stories question the nature of reality and the validity of individual perception. Read “Young Goodman Brown” and focus on the events or objects that cause Goodman to question his assumptions about his neighbors and that cause him to seek outward signs of their secret guilt. Compare and contrast Goodman and Irene. What does each of these stories tell us about our own self-constructed realities? About public identity? About society and social interaction in general?

The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever’s first novel, was published by Harpers in 1957 and won the

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National Book Award in 1958. Cheever claimed that writing the novel took 20 years, and many critics see strong similarities between the novel and Cheever’s life. Though the novel explores many of Cheever’s darker themes, such as the ambiguities of love and familial commitments, several literary scholars have successfully argued that the novel is essentially a comic work in that Cheever accepts the chaos and uncertainty of everyday life and describes how imagination and moral striving can rejuvenate the human spirit. The Wapshot Chronicle is mainly set in St. Botolphs, a port in Massachusetts, from around 1890 to the 1950s and follows the lives of the Wapshots, a formerly wealthy and adventurous seafaring family. The main characters include Leander, the family patriarch with a penchant for nature, adventure, and amateur philosophy; Sarah, his wife and a local civic leader; Moses and Coverly, their sons; and Cousin Honora, the willful wealthy family matriarch. Though the novel is episodic, the main plot revolves around Leander as he comes to terms with his aging; with his wife, who has become the primary source of income; and with the accident that destroys his boat, the Topaze, with which he has ferried passengers from Travertine to Nangasakit for a number of years. Additionally, the novel catalogs the trials of Moses and Coverly as they attempt to find suitable careers and wives who will bear them sons so that they might obtain their wealthy cousin’s inheritance. When the novel was published, many critics took issue with the loosely connected chapters, which, at first glance, seem somewhat unstructured and disorganized. Later critics noted the chapters’ artful arrangement, which helps juxtapose Cheever’s themes and ideas. Because of the episodic layout, Cheever covers significant periods, highlighting common threads in characters’ lives and ruminating about the cyclical nature of life with all of its vicissitudes, its successes and failures. We see especially this circularity through the story of Leander as he attempts to relive the adventures of his predecessors and tries to pass on his life lessons to his sons. Through the correspondence of the father and his sons, we see just how many experiences they end up sharing and how, though time has certainly changed some things, many

of Leander’s philosophical musings serve his children quite well. Nevertheless, Cheever’s comic tendencies do not altogether crowd out the Cheeverian chaos pervading the human experience or the realistic portrait of tragedy and loss of a family striving to recreate the past while also fostering hope for the future. Simultaneously painful and hilarious, the novel focuses on love in its many forms: family love and commitment, the love of significant places, the search for a spouse and marriage, and the love of life and its never-ending possibilities. The love motif helps us accept the eccentricities of the characters, makes us both laugh and gasp as Moses precariously tiptoes across the rooftop to his lover’s bedroom, and allows us simultaneously to feel the sorrow of Leander’s suicide and the relief of knowing that his peculiar notions of beauty and hope live on in his sons.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In The Wapshot Chronicle, Leander Wapshot often feels a sense of loss when he ponders how his ancestors went to sea to “seek their fortune” while he is relegated to ferrying passengers to and fro from the nearby amusement park. Consider some other, older epic tales that you have read (for example, The Iliad, or Beowulf) and compare their heroes to the heroes of stories of our time. What are the major differences in either the way the stories are told or the way the heroes compare to one another? Is there anything heroic about Leander? If so, what? 2. Many critics have called this novel a comedy. A comedy is generally a work in which many of the trials and obstacles facing the main characters are neatly dispelled at the end of the work, and many comedies end in a marriage or in a reconciliation of some sort. Given this, how do you view the novel’s ending? Do you consider it comic? Why or why not? Could we consider this novel a tragedy? Can we neatly categorize this novel as one or the other?

“The Death of Justina” (1961) John Cheever’s “The Death of Justina” is the first story in his fourth volume of short stories, Some

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People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel, which was published in 1961. This story, which comments on itself and on writing in general (literary critics often label such works metanarratives—stories that comment on the process of making and interpreting stories), includes many first-person observations. It also contains many of the themes found in Cheever’s earlier works: the absurdity of the social and occupational demands in the postwar, “postmodern” world; the mutual self-delusions of marriage and mortality; the inhuman essence of our bureaucratic society; and, perhaps most importantly, the role of fiction and art in our lives. “The Death of Justina” is written from the firstperson point of view of Moses Wapshot, one of the protagonists of Cheever’s novel The Wapshot Chronicle. This story appeared in 1961, four years after The Wapshot Chronicle was published, and some critics have complained that even though the narrator is obviously Moses Wapshot, the Moses of this story retains few, if any, of the original Moses characteristics. As the tale opens, Moses laments how time and change confound “one’s purest memories and ambitions”; he questions our ability to understand the times in which we live, claiming that in order to overcome chaos, we must rely on art, especially fiction. Even so, he wonders whether “in a world that changes more swiftly than we can perceive there is always the danger that our powers of selection will be mistaken and that the vision we serve will come to nothing.” Here, we perhaps hear the author’s voice blending with the voice of the protagonist: Both individuals wonder whether fiction’s ability to capture the essence of its time somehow limits its chances of overcoming chaos because the “selection” of what to include and what to exclude may not fully communicate its message across changing times. After challenging readers to look into their own past for examples of Moses’s ideas of ubiquitous chaos, Moses describes how his doctor has recently advised him to quit smoking and drinking, and he catalogs the problems he encounters in trying to do so. He then explains that his wife’s cousin, Justina, has arrived for a visit, and though she appears “lively,” she unexpectedly dies on his couch while he is at work. When he tells his boss that he must leave

work early because of the family emergency, his boss commands him to finish his work on the upcoming Elixircol commercial before he leaves (another coworker has already left to assist his grandmother, who has fallen off a stepladder). Ironically, Elixircol is hailed as “the true juice of youth.” Moses writes the commercial while elucidating his own preoccupation with life, mortality, and the difficulties of growing older. His fi rst version of the commercial includes claims that Elixircol can rejuvenate its users’ sexuality, their sense of well-being, and even their perceptions of their spouses; he ends the commercial with the actress’s encouraging potential users to “borrow [the cash] from your neighborhood loan shark or hold up a bank.” When he arrives home and phones the family doctor to find out how he should deal with Justina’s corpse, Moses learns that his home is located in “Zone B.” He also discovers that after a hasty Village Council meeting moved to shut down a proposed funeral home in the area, the council members went too far and mandated that “you not only can’t have a funeral home in Zone B—you can’t bury anything there and you can’t die there.” Here, we see other themes common in Cheever’s work—the absurdity and inhumanity of governing bureaucracies and the culture’s attempts to avoid acknowledging or encountering death. In their attempts to appease the wishes of the masses, bureaucracies often overlook not only individual problems but also problems that everyone will have to face. In fact, when Moses petitions the mayor to grant him an exception, the mayor tells him, “But it’s just that it happened in the wrong zone and if I make an exception for you I’ll have to make an exception for everyone and this kind of morbidity, when it gets out of hand, can be very depressing. People don’t like to live in a neighborhood where this sort of thing goes on all the time.” Significantly, Moses faces the inevitability and reality of death that our culture often tries to downplay. After obtaining the exception, Justina is “removed,” and Moses dreams that he is in a supermarket where nothing is labeled and all the items are indiscernible, wrapped in “odd shapes.” Proceeding toward the checkout, Moses notices that there are “brutes” waiting at the door, and they tear open each custom-

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er’s packages. Once they see what they were actually purchasing, “in every case the customer, at the sight of what he had chosen, showed all the symptoms of the deepest guilt; that force that brings us to our knees.” Coupled with Moses’s last two attempts to write the Elixircol commercial, the first of which claims that “only Elixircol can save you” from the “lethal atomic waste” in the air and the second of which quotes Psalm 23, the dream represents our inability to comprehend death and our inability to understand how many decisions do not have their intended results. In the final scene, Cheever highlights all the themes he explores in this piece by describing the cemetery where Justina is buried as a place “where [the dead] are transported furtively as knaves and scoundrels and where they lie in an atmosphere of perfect neglect. Justina’s life had been exemplary, but by ending it she seemed to have disgraced us all.” Here, Cheever emphasizes how the fear of death creates bureaucracies to deal with unwanted problems (e.g., the Village Council) and creates occupations (such as morticians and cemetery attendants) further to distance us, the living, from ever having to confront mortality. Of course, Moses’s many failed attempts to market Elixircol tie into these ideas very nicely; Moses himself promotes a product that profits from people’s fear of death. Cheever’s selection of specific, meaningful instances from Moses’s chaotic life mirrors the way art can overcome the apparent chaos of human experience. The commercial and his bosses’ unwillingness to accommodate his family emergency, his aunt’s death, his doctor’s admonitions concerning smoking and drinking, his concerns about his own life choices, and his dream all deal with the themes of mortality and the absurdity of the modern human experience. Cheever’s selections show us a man dealing with intertwined, unavoidable issues. Although it seems as though every facet of Moses’s existence ties into these themes, Moses still struggles to overcome the complexities of mortality, absurdity, and the chaos contained therein. As Moses puts it, “How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explores some themes that are found in “The Death of Justina,” including an examination of our fear of death and our myriad ways of avoiding contact with it. Write a well-developed essay that compares the two works and the “fear of death” theme. 2. This story also explores the absurdity of U.S. commercial enterprises by contrasting their claims with the everyday reality that Moses experiences. Read Don DeLillo’s White Noise, noting the many references to commerce, advertisements, and popular culture. Finally, write a well-developed essay that compares the way the two authors deal with societies bombarded by advertising.

“The Swimmer” (1964) Cheever included “The Swimmer” in his fifth volume of short stories, The Brigadier and the Golf Widow, which was published in 1964 and remains his only work that has been adapted for the big screen. Many readers have noted how Cheever’s later stories tend toward a darker, more ominous view of human nature and American society in general, and this certainly seems true of “The Swimmer.” This story, as does “The Enormous Radio,” consists of a surrealistic blend of reality and fantasy, which is mainly achieved by juxtaposing Neddy Merrill’s conflicted inner thoughts with the conversations and interactions of Bullet Park’s social elite. “The Swimmer” takes place among the pools and alcoholic drinks of Bullet Park, an upscale neighborhood in Westchester, New York, on a warm Sunday afternoon. While the afternoon drinkers sit around discussing how they all “drank too much” the night before, Neddy Merrill decides to take on a heroic challenge, swimming through all the pools on his way home, which is eight miles away. As he goes from pool to pool and after he revels in an afternoon thunderstorm, he notices an autumnal chill in the air, and his heroic spirit begins to dwindle. In order to reach home, he must cross a busy freeway, where he suffers from hurled insults and beer cans. He encounters many old friends and acquaintances; some of these

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cordially offer him drinks and their condolences concerning his recent tribulations, of which he has no memory, and others, such as his former mistress, treat him with an indifference that masks outright disdain. When he reaches home, he finds the doors locked and the house emptied and in a state of disrepair, as though it has been long abandoned. The story’s surrealistic nature highlights its concerns with memory, perception, and the way time affects both of these. The limited omniscient thirdperson narrator, privy only to Neddy’s thoughts, reports only bits of dialogue throughout the story. Much as does Neddy’s memory, which has formerly seemed a “gift for concealing painful facts,” the narrator slices through time and significance, leaving the reader to figure out how this story could plausibly take place in one afternoon. In fact, though we learn that Neddy is bankrupt and his four daughters are in some sort of trouble, we never learn the surrounding circumstances or whether the friends who line the Lucinda River, as he has named the pools leading to his house, are even still his friends or whether they only treat him hospitably out of pity. Near the end of his journey, fi nding his swimming trunks looser than before, Neddy himself wonders whether he has lost weight on his journey, implicitly suggesting that the action of the story may not have taken place in one day. Therefore, though we initially see Neddy’s consciousness as coherent and logical, if somewhat childish, we learn that his perceptions do not match the commentary provided by his former neighbors. As with many of Cheever’s surrealistic, episodic tales, objective reality and individual perception uneasily stand side by side, each threatening to overtake the other. The water imagery that pervades the story—from the title to the use of “drank too much” four times in the first paragraph—resembles Neddy’s memories and perceptions. As a river seeks the path of least resistance through bedrock, Neddy’s memory slips past the events leading up to his bankruptcy and his daughters’ troubles. Instead of focusing on the unpleasant, he focuses instead on the good times he has shared with old friends, on the days when the world seemed full of opportunity, and on the times when his social and economic capital allowed him

unfettered access to the pools of his neighbors. Even as Grace Biswanger, whose pool occupies a place on the Lucinda River, mocks him for not replying to her invitations for dinner, he thinks, “She could not deal him a social blow—there was no question about this and he did not flinch.” Afterward, her bartender, responding to his employer’s remark, serves Neddy rudely. Confronted with this overt hostility, Grace’s rude treatment of him, and the knowledge that his former mistress has taken a new lover and now has no interest in him, Neddy enters a vertiginous, unsettled world. Neddy’s memories and subsequent perceptions allow him to escape the pain of his recent troubles; however, his elitist friends, with their penchant for gossip, will not fail to mention his plight. Thus, even though the first leg of his journey inspired a youthful determinism and heroism, he finds only questions about his present state, ambivalence, and even thinly veiled aggression after he endures insults while crossing the highway. As Jim and Irene Westcott in “The Enormous Radio” fi nd their perceptions drastically altered after acquiring their new radio, Neddy’s misadventure forces him to face his own past and present. In keeping with several other critical examinations, Samuel Coale writes that “in Cheever’s darker tales objects often seem to overwhelm the characters’ sense of well-being, as if these people were living in a strange and alien world of obstacles and mysteriously laid traps” (35). In “The Swimmer,” Neddy’s quest, which is a self-chosen task, reminds him of his repressed past and shows him that he no longer possesses his youthful abilities. Though his journey homeward is intended to fulfi ll his reputation “as a legendary figure” and to “enlarge and celebrate [the day’s] beauty,” the experience brings him to tears for “the fi rst time in his adult life.” Finally, at the last pool on his journey, he climbs down the ladder and enters the pool, whereas previously he held “an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools.” In this moment Neddy confronts the delusions he has harbored about his marriage and daughters, his social ties and status, his unaffected optimism, and his indefatigable physical ability. Similarly to Jim Westcott’s revelations about his wife’s morally ques-

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tionable actions (her seeming indifference to having an abortion, taking her sister’s inheritance, etc.), Neddy’s fantastical perception of his life drowns during his quest up the Lucinda River, and his repressed troubles rise to the surface.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Memory and perception are two major themes of “The Swimmer” and “The Enormous Radio.” These themes are connected to the idea that certain types of knowledge can be harmful, even if such knowledge provides some semblance of objective truth. In our contemporary time of competing interpretations of truth (creationism/ evolution, global warming, pro-life/pro-choice), discuss how your own memories and subsequent perceptions of truth and reality serve to provide you with a past record of your experiences. Do your memories of these events perfectly match the memories of others who witnessed the same events? Is your memory only a record-keeping device, or does it influence future behavior? How? Where is the line between objective truth and individual perception(s) of reality? 2. At the outset of “The Swimmer,” the narrator describes Neddy, claiming “he might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one.” Though seasons are regularly used to describe the phases of the human experience (spring and childhood, winter and death, etc.), Cheever focuses on the final days of summer for this story. How does the comparison between Neddy and the summer’s day help to illuminate the story’s themes? How do summer and Neddy differ; how are they similar? What significance does this comparison have for the overall meaning of the story?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON CHEEVER AND HIS WORK 1. John Cheever has often been compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, and Franz Kafka. Read Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” and compare it to either Cheever’s “The

Swimmer” or “The Enormous Radio.” How do these stories achieve their feeling of normal reality and the surreal? What effect does this have on the reader? Do the surreal aspects of these stories help you understand the situation and the characters, or do they simply serve to limit your ability to pass judgment on the characters and situations? 2. Many critics have noted Cheever’s ability to imbue his fairly realistic stories with an air of the mythic. Read some myths (Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Edith Hamilton’s Mythology are a good start) and compare them to some of Cheever’s stories. Generally speaking, myths have several sociological functions: social commentary, explaining the origins of natural phenomena, explaining the alteration of natural phenomena, commenting on the relationship between humans and the gods or between humans and nature. Which of these functions does Cheever generally address? How do the classical myths compare to Cheever’s more contemporary myths? Given that the most famous myths were created thousands of years ago, why do you think Cheever has chosen to continue using some of their devices and subject matter? Is this a worthwhile enterprise, in your opinion? Why or why not? 3. Much of Cheever’s work focuses on suburbia and the wealthy families who generally live there. Read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and compare its commentary on the American dream with the situations explored in Cheever’s “The Death of Justina.” How do these works complicate our ideals of a free market and capitalism? How do our ideals about consumerism, social status, and material wealth compare with the realities created by these issues? 4. A significant portion of Cheever’s stories, including “The Swimmer,” “The Enormous Radio,” and “The Death of Justina,” focus on the lies that we tell ourselves every day, which perhaps stem from a desire to be someone or something we are not, a desire to escape our boredom, or a desire that our lives go smoothly and without confl ict. Often, it is easier to notice these deceptions in the lives of close friends or family mem-

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bers than to recognize this tendency in ourselves. Take one day of your life, carry around a journal, and note how these deceptions are made manifest or make themselves known. Are there external representations of these deceptions? If so, what are they? After giving this some thought, discuss the positive and negative attributes of these selfdeceptions or self-delusions. What is their function? Are they necessary, or could we get along without them? WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Auser, Cortland P. “John Cheever’s Myth of Man and Time: ‘The Swimmer.’” CEA Critic 29 (March 1967): 18–19. Bosha, Francis J. John Cheever: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. ———. “The John Cheever Manuscript Collection at Brandeis University.” Resources for American Literary Study 20, no. 1 (1994): 45–53. Bracher, Frederick. “John Cheever and Comedy.” Critique 6 (Spring 1963): 66–77. ———. “John Cheever: A Vision of the World.” Claremont Quarterly 11 (Winter 1964): 47–57. Brans, Jo. “Stories to Comprehend Life: An Interview with John Cheever.” Southwest Review 65 (1980): 337–345. Cheever, John. The Brigadier and the Golf Widow. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. ———. Bullet Park. New York: Knopf, 1969. ———. The Enormous Radio and Other Stories. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1953. ———. Falconer. New York: Knopf, 1977. ———. The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1958. ———. Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. ———. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1978. ———. The Wapshot Chronicle. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. ———. The Wapshot Scandal. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. ———. The Way Some People Live. New York: Random House, 1943.

———. The World of Apples. New York: Knopf, 1973. Cheever, Susan. Home before Dark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Coale, Samuel. John Cheever. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977. Collins, Robert G., ed. Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1982. “Fiction: John Cheever.” Available online. URL: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/litlinks/fiction/cheever.htm Accessed July 4, 2006. Garrett, George. “John Cheever and the Charms of Innocence: The Craft of The Wapshot Scandal.” Hollins Critic 1 (April 1964): 1–12. Greene, Beatrice. “Icarus at St. Botolphs: A Descent to ‘Unwonted Otherness.’” Style 5 (Spring 1971): 119–137. Harmsel, Henrietta T. “‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘The Enormous Radio.’” Studies in Short Fiction 9 (Fall 1972): 407–408. Hunt, George W. John Cheever: The Hobgoblin Company of Love. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983. Kendle, Burton. “Cheever’s Use of Mythology in ‘The Enormous Radio.’” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (Spring 1967): 262–274. Meanor, Patrick. John Cheever Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1995. Moore, S. C. “The Hero on the 5:42: John Cheever’s Short Fiction.” Western Humanities Review 30 (Spring 1976): 147–152. O’Hara, James E. John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. “Ovid in Ossining.” Time, 27 March 1964, pp. 66–70. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century, 1945 to the Present—John Cheever.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http://www. csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/cheever. html. Accessed May 10, 2006. Trakas, Deno. “John Cheever: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography (1943–1978).” Resources for American Literary Study 9 (1979): 181–199. Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Joshua K. Tinsley

Ralph Ellison (1913–1994) No matter how strictly Negroes are segregated socially and politically, on the level of the imagination their ability to achieve freedom is limited only by their individual aspiration, insight, energy and will. (Collected Essays 163)

A

lthough he published only one fi nished novel, Invisible Man, and a small number of self-contained short stories, Ralph Ellison remains one of the most widely honored of all African-American writers of fiction. Invisible Man was hailed as a classic almost from the moment of its fi rst appearance, and indeed the enormous praise that greeted the book may have contributed to the exceptional pressure Ellison felt to produce a worthy successor. This pressure resulted, ironically, in years (and then in decades) of creative inhibition, as Ellison worked on a huge manuscript that never did result in a complete and coherent second novel. Excerpts were occasionally published, but when he died in 1994, he had become almost as famous for the absence of his second novel as for the distinction of his fi rst. Nevertheless, his career had been productive in numerous other ways: He often wrote essays, frequently gave speeches, and repeatedly served on boards, commissions, panels, and agencies. Although disdained by many younger black writers (who saw him as reactionary and ungenerous), at his death he was still regarded as the author of one of the most important works of 20th-century American fiction. Many of the most important facts of Ellison’s life are laid out in Arnold Rampersad’s biography and in the helpful chronology prepared by Robert Butler (xli–xlv). Although Ellison’s birth was often misreported as occurring in 1914, he was actually born

on March 1, 1913, in Oklahoma City, the first son of Lewis Ellison (a small businessman who sold coal and ice) and Ida Milsap Ellison (a loving mother with a strong social conscience). Ellison’s fi rst and middle names—Ralph Waldo—reflect the fact that he was named after the great 19th-century American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. These given names reflect the ambitions his parents had for him: Ralph’s father hoped that his son would become a poet, and Ralph’s mother always encouraged his interest in reading and desire to learn. As the son of lower-middle-class blacks who were living outside the Deep South, Ralph began life in a slightly more fortunate position than many other members of his race, but his fortunes soon took a decided turn for the worse when his father died, on July 19, 1916, from an accident when Ralph was three years old. Suddenly the family (which now included a recently born younger brother) found themselves destitute; Ralph’s widowed mother could not, at first, even afford to bury her husband, whose body had rapidly begun to deteriorate in the hot Oklahoma summer. Mrs. Ellison soon had to begin working as a maid to support her children, often taking home reading material from the homes where she worked. She also always encouraged her sons to take their schooling seriously. Ralph, in fact, became a good student and a voracious reader; he attended a rigorous high school and often visited the local library. In school he not only studied and played sports but also developed

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an intense interest in music, so that by the time he graduated he had become an accomplished trumpet player. He loved both the classics and jazz, eventually aspiring to be a composer who would draw on the traditions of black harmonies, techniques, rhythms, and melodies. In the meantime, Ellison had also been working a series of part-time jobs that gave him exposure to a wide slice of “real life”—life that was often far from pleasant for a poor black youth. Although Ellison’s initial attempts to go to college were frustrated, eventually he was granted a scholarship to study music at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. At that time, Tuskegee was the most famous institution of higher learning for blacks in the United States (if not the world), although it had begun to lose much of the luster it possessed when it was fi rst founded by Booker T. Washington at the end of the 19th century. Arriving in Tuskegee in 1933 after a somewhat harrowing trip in which he had been forced by poverty to hitch an illegal ride on a freight train as it moved through the segregated and often hostile South, Ellison hoped to study at the institute with the noted black composer Walter L. Dawson. He did, but his experiences with the often-distant Dawson were disappointing. In fact, Ellison’s entire experience at Tuskegee left much to be desired; he found the school stifl ing, overregimented, uninspired, and uninspiring. Despite these shortcomings, Ellison did encounter a few mentors who challenged and encouraged him—including an English professor and a friendly librarian. His interests began to shift from music to sculpture, but he was also taking advantage of the school’s library. Here Ellison read widely and developed a growing interest in modern American literature—and especially in T. S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land. After finishing his junior year at Tuskegee, fi nancial difficulties (as well as tension with the administrators) made it difficult for Ellison to return for his final year. He thus made the fateful decision to go to New York City, earn some money there, study sculpture with a noted artist, and perhaps return to Tuskegee at some later time. As it happened, he never returned—at least not as a student. When he eventually did, it was to be honored by an alma mater he had not altogether enjoyed.

During his time at the institute, Ellison had happened to meet the noted Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who was known for generously encouraging younger colleagues. As luck would have it, in 1936 Ellison ran into Hughes by chance once again on his second day in New York, where Ellison was staying at the Harlem YMCA. Hughes not only took an interest in him and suggested helpful reading material, but also introduced Ellison to Richard Wright, at that time an up-and-coming black intellectual and fiction writer who would soon produce Native Son, one of the most important novels by any African-American author. Wright helped Ellison find employment, encouraged him to write, published his work, discussed ideas with him, and in general provided a valuable role model for the ambitious young man. By this time, Ellison had decided that his main interest lay not in composing or sculpting but in writing, and particularly in writing fiction. As with Wright and Hughes, his politics had become leftwing and he was even involved for a time with the Communist Party (as many intellectuals were during the 1930s, partly in response to the economic ravages of the Great Depression). Ellison began his career as a writer by publishing book reviews and essays and by doing research and writing for the Federal Writers’ Project, but it was not long before he produced short stories and tentatively planned to write a novel. The death of his mother in 1937, however, was a major blow; although he had sometimes lost touch with her, Ellison revered her memory for the rest of his life: She had always been a major source of emotional encouragement for him, even keeping him financially afloat (especially during his time in college). It was not long after losing his mother, however, that he also found a wife: On September 16, 1938, he married a young black actress named Rose Poindexter. Although their relationship would not last, at first they were content. Ellison’s first published story (“Slick Gonna Learn”) appeared in 1939; soon a second tale (“The Birthmark”) was not only published in a Leftist magazine, but also selected for inclusion in an anthology, The Best Stories of 1940. By 1942 Ellison, whose profile was rising, had become managing editor of the Negro Quarterly, where he was in a position to

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commission work by other aspiring writers. Ellison’s career as an increasingly prominent man of letters was interrupted by his need to take part in the war effort after the United States became involved in World War II. He had no interest in serving in the segregated army, and so he joined the Merchant Marine service, making risky voyages across the submarine-infested Atlantic to deliver supplies to allied forces in Europe. He continued to write during this time, publishing two of his most notable short stories—“King of the Bingo Game” and “Flying Home”—in 1944. The latter work was related to a novel on which Ellison was also working at this time—a novel he never finished and one that he soon abandoned in favor of the new project that would eventually become Invisible Man. He was at work on this new book by 1945. By this time he had been divorced by Rose, partly as a result of his affair with a married woman, Fanny Buford. Fanny, too, was soon divorced, and on August 28, 1946, Ralph and she married. Though their marriage was troubled almost from the start, it endured for almost 50 years, generally satisfying both of them (especially in its final decades). Fanny was bright, articulate, and skilled at earning a living when Ralph needed her support and totally devoted to Ralph’s career. Work on Invisible Man proceeded more slowly than Ellison had anticipated, but by 1947 the famous “battle royal” section was published separately as a magazine article. Eventually, in 1952, the entire book appeared. White reviewers tended to be extremely enthusiastic in their praise; despite some reservations, many whites considered the book the best novel yet published by an African-American author, and indeed some immediately ranked it among the best American novels by writers of any background. Black commentators, ironically, tended to be less enthused: Many saw the book as being full of unhelpful stereotypes and thought that it offered a severely limited depiction of the black American experience. Enthusiasts of the novel were vindicated, however, when Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953, beating Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. From that point forward, Ellison was widely considered the most promising black novelist in

the country, and awards, prizes, and appointments came his way with gratifying regularity. In 1954, for instance, he won a Rockefeller Foundation Award, and in 1955–56 he received the Prix de Rome of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He traveled and lectured in Europe, Japan, and the Indian subcontinent. Throughout this period and despite marital troubles resulting from a serious affair with a woman he met in Rome, Ellison was hard at work on a second novel, which he hoped would solidify his reputation as the best black writer in America and perhaps the world. He produced essays, taught at colleges, served on various boards, and published stories derived from his growing manuscript, but the novel itself remained unfinished. Ellison was a perfectionist, and undoubtedly he felt enormous pressure to live up to the extremely high standards he had set for himself by producing Invisible Man. The renown that book had achieved continued to grow as the years passed; in 1965, for instance, it was selected by Book Week magazine as the best American novel published after World War II. Ellison was gratified, but he also must have wondered whether he could ever equal (let alone surpass) the success of his first book. In 1967 a fire at one of his homes destroyed part of the manuscript on which he had been working, but the destructiveness of the blaze has sometimes been exaggerated (apparently more of the second book survived than Ellison sometimes claimed). In any case, the reading public continued to wait—and wait—for his new work to appear. Meanwhile, Ellison enjoyed a prosperous and prominent existence. In 1969 he received the Medal of Freedom from President Johnson; in 1970 he was made a chevalier de l’Order des Arts et Lettres by the French government, and in the same year he was appointed to a prestigious position at New York University. By this time, too, however, Ellison had also come under increasing attack by younger, more radical black intellectuals. During a time of great racial and civil turmoil—with the country torn apart by racial unrest and disagreements over the Vietnam War—Ellison saw himself as a moderate but was thought by many to be conservative, even reactionary. A proud man and a somewhat aloof figure, Ellison seemed increasingly cut off (by himself

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and by others) from the main currents of AfricanAmerican life in the United States. He moved comfortably among the predominantly white elite and tried to promote the interests of his people from his new place of prominence, but he rejected the radicalism of black nationalists and others. He considered his chief obligation to be one of honing and polishing his art. Meanwhile, work on the second novel continued, and continued, and continued. A small portion of the book was published in 1973, and two years later Ellison was honored again by being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He had already been elected or appointed to numerous other important organizations, and he continued to receive honorary degrees and other forms of public recognition. In 1986 he published a new collection of essays, but still no second novel appeared. By this time, Ellison had become the butt of jokes in some circles; he had joined that small but intriguing list of significant American authors who launch their careers with a major success and then never quite fulfill the promise suggested by their first books. (Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is one example; J. D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, is another.) In the final years of Ellison’s life, he had become almost as famous for not producing a second novel as he had been for producing his first one, and when he died on April 16, 1994, the second book had still not appeared. Ellison, though, had left behind a huge stack of manuscript pages, and from this pile his friend and literary executor, John F. Callahan, assembled (with the approval of Ellison’s widow) a novel titled Juneteenth, published in 1999 to decidedly mixed reviews. Because this novel included only a small portion of the unpublished manuscript Ellison had spent decades producing, there is a great likelihood that more of his later writings will eventually be published. It seems unlikely, however, that any subsequent publication will ever achieve the fame and respect generated in 1952 by Invisible Man.

“King of the Bingo Game” (1944) A southern black man now living in a northern city is sitting in a movie theater, watching a fi lm he has

already seen before as he thinks about his hunger, his poverty, his inability to find work, and the lifethreatening illness of Laura, the woman he loves. Drifting off to sleep, he remembers his fearful life in the South. As he dreams, the sounds he makes disturb the people sitting near him; one of them offers him a drink. Then, after the fi lm concludes, the assembled audience plays a game of bingo, and the unnamed central character wins a chance to press a button that will spin a wheel, allowing him a further chance to win a substantial jackpot. Pressing the button without letting go, the anonymous protagonist is sure that if he holds the button long enough, he will win. As he continues pressing the button and as the wheel continues spinning, the crowd becomes more and more annoyed, until, eventually, the man is struck from behind by two uniformed men—just as the number he had been hoping for appears on the wheel. As does Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, this story combines elements of realistic description with even stronger elements of surrealistic fantasy and symbolism. At first the story appears to be a straightforward “slice of life” depiction of the existence of a “normal” (if somewhat desperate) human being, but once the unnamed man ascends the stage and begins pressing the button that controls the wheel of fortune, the story takes on a more fantastic tone and a more obviously symbolic resonance. The central character—whose seemingly illogical, irrational behavior in refusing to let go of the button is fed partly by his hunger, partly by the whiskey he has been offered, and partly by the sheer hopelessness of his life—represents the frustrations of American blacks in particular, but he also represents the existential despair of any human being who feels at the end of his or her rope. The protagonist’s fi xation on winning the prize is driven partly by his intense love for the aptly named “Laura” (the same name given by the great Italian poet Petrarch to the symbolic woman in his collection of poems The Canzoniere); she represents a source of affection and of profound meaning in his life, and his intense desire to save her from death helps explain his otherwise bizarre behavior. Without his connection to Laura, he would be even more isolated and alienated than he is already;

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in seeking to save her, he seeks to save his own link to a normal, meaningful, and satisfying existence. His strong compulsion to try to “win” at the game of life is a need with which most readers will be able to identify, and it is partly this focus on beating the odds and preserving his dignity that makes the story seem relevant not simply to blacks but to all human beings. Race and racial discrimination per se are less important factors in this work than they are in some of Ellison’s other fiction (such as Invisible Man, “Flying Home,” or “A Party Down the Square”); in the present tale, Ellison seems to be dealing with hopes, fears, and desires that any person can take to heart. In this sense, his concerns are existential rather than only cultural. Thus, the hostility the central character faces is as much from black members of the theater audience as from any white oppressors, while the afflictions from which he suffers (hunger, thirst, poverty, alienation, and worry about the health of a loved one) are torments that might easily trouble the life of any human being. If anything, the story is as much about class as it is about race. Stylistically, the story has a number of strengths: The phrasing is simple, clear, and straightforward; the dialogue is convincingly colloquial; the symbolism (such as the wheel of fortune) does not seem especially heavy-handed; and the odd behavior of the protagonist seems plausible in view of the physical and psychological stress from which he has been suffering. Sometimes the imagery is sharp and vivid (as in the description of the protagonist’s fear that “the rush of blood to his head would burst out in baseball seams of small red droplets”; King of the Bingo Game 133), and sometimes the phrasing seems almost Faulknerian in its use of long, convoluted passages with italicized interjections, as in the following memorable sentence: He had to get away, vomit all, and his mind formed an image of himself running with Laura in his arms down the tracks of the subway just ahead of the A train, running desperately vomit with people screaming for him to come out but knowing no way of leaving the tracks because to stop would bring the train crashing down upon him and to attempt to leave the tracks would

mean to run into a hot third rail as high as his waist which threw blue sparks that blinded his eyes until he could hardly see. (King of the Bingo Game 134)

Passages such as this not only convey—but also recreate in the reader’s mind—the protagonist’s frantic sense of frenzy and disorientation, and although not all the language of the work is as vivid and fresh as the phrasing just quoted, Ellison does manage (especially in the second half of the tale) to achieve memorable psychological effects. Indeed, by the end of the story many readers will have come to share the theater audience’s sense of impatient frustration even as they also find themselves sympathizing with the fanatical protagonist. In style, theme, and impact, this story, with its anonymous central character, seems almost a trial run for Ellison’s Invisible Man.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read this story alongside Claude McKay’s poem “Harlem Shadows” and then discuss the ways both works deal with such issues as poverty, desperation, the desire for dignity, and the need for hope. How do the works differ in diction, imagery, point of view, and ultimate effect? 2. Compare and contrast this story with Zora Neale Hurston’s tale “The Gilded Six-Bits.” Discuss the role of money in each work, particularly the way a desire for money provokes life-altering behavior in both stories. How is the desire for money of the protagonist of Ellison’s story different from the desire for money exhibited by the main characters of Hurston’s tale?

“Flying Home” (1944) A young black pilot in training named Todd crashlands his military aircraft in a field owned by a white farmer after the plane collides with a buzzard in the skies above Alabama; when Todd regains consciousness, he is helped by an old black man named Jefferson and a young black boy named Teddy. As Teddy runs off to seek help, Todd and Jefferson talk; during their conversation, Jefferson relates a comic tale about

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visiting heaven and speeding around as an angel with just one wing. Todd, offended by Jefferson’s story, verbally attacks the old man; he then remembers his own lifelong fascination with planes, before the belligerent and racist white farmer who owns the field shows up and orders him off his land. In this story Ellison adopts a different strategy from the one he employed in his exceptionally powerful tale “A Party Down the Square.” Both texts deal explicitly with racial themes, but whereas in “A Party” Ellison had condemned racism through irony and indirection, here he adopts the overtly moralizing perspective of a young black man who has grown up in a racist society and whose entire life has been warped by racist pressures. We are taken inside his thoughts and feelings and allowed to perceive the world as he does, but we are also given the added perspective of Jefferson, the old man who has spent his entire life in a region controlled by hostile or indifferent whites. The story suggests why Todd cannot be satisfied by the compromises Jefferson has had to endure; at the same time, it also presents Jefferson in a largely sympathetic and attractive light. The old man exhibits kindness, compassion, humor, and thoughtfulness in ways that are less characteristic of Todd. Thus Ellison (in a manner that contributes to the complexity of the story) does not simply present Todd in altogether admirable ways: We glimpse his condescension, his bitterness, and his temper, but we are also led to see how those traits are partly the result of the frustrations he has been forced to suffer in a culture that denies him the opportunities to achieve his deepest goals or feel any genuine self-respect. In one of the most explicit thematic statements in the text, Ellison has Todd reflect as follows: Between ignorant black men and condescending whites, his course of fl ight seemed mapped by the nature of things away from all needed and natural landmarks. Under some sealed orders, couched in ever more technical and mysterious terms, his path curved swiftly away from both the shame the old man symbolized and the cloudy terrain of white man’s regard. Flying blind, he knew but one point of landing and there he would receive his wings. After that the enemy would appreci-

ate his skill and he would assume his deepest meaning, he thought sadly, neither from those who condescended nor from those who praised without understanding, but from the enemy who would recognize his manhood and skill in terms of hate. (Flying Home 152)

Here as elsewhere in the story, Ellison runs the risk of pontificating: The symbolism seems a bit heavy-handed, the extended metaphor is perhaps too extended, the character’s feelings are explained rather than dramatized, and the passage veers toward a tone that is preachy and propagandistic. “Flying Home” sometimes seems sentimental and overwritten in ways that are never true of “A Party Down the Square,” and such flaws are particularly evident when Todd is reminiscing about his childhood. At one point, for instance, Ellison writes, “It was as though an endless series of hangars had been shaken ajar in the airbase of his memory and from each, like a young wasp emerging from its cell, arose the memory of a plane” (Flying Home 162). At another point, in an italicized reminiscence, Todd recalls that “Blossoms hung from the thorny black locust trees like clusters of fragrant white grapes. Butterflies flickered in the sunlight above the short new dew-wet grass” (Flying Home 164). Passages such as these can unfortunately seem overripe; luckily, they are counterbalanced by other segments (such as the long sentence beginning “He was going mysteriously with his mother.” [Flying Home 169] or the humorous ending of Jefferson’s story about flying in heaven) that prevent the work from sounding excessively contrived. If “Flying Home” lacks the harrowing, unforgettable power of “A Party Down the Square,” it nonetheless spells out, about as explicitly as one could wish, many of the central themes and attitudes expressed in Ellison’s fiction as well as his fundamental diagnosis of the pervasive ills caused by white American racism.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read W. E. B. DuBois’s essay “Criteria of Negro Art,” and then discuss this story in relation to the ideas expressed there. Would DuBois have been satisfied with Ellison’s story? Does the story meet the demands DuBois makes of art? To

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what degree and in what ways is Ellison’s story an example of the kind of art as propaganda that DuBois commends? 2. In what ways does the protagonist of “Flying Home” resemble and/or differ from the title character of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? How and why do both men feel alienated, lonely, and uncertain? How do their responses to their predicaments differ? How are their personalities and temperaments distinct?

Invisible Man (1952) Invisible Man is narrated by the anonymous title character (whose name is never revealed), who describes his disillusioning experiences as a black youth growing up in the racist South and then his further disillusionment when he attends an allblack southern college (obviously modeled on the Tuskegee Institute). After being expelled from the college because he inadvertently let one of its rich white northern trustees see too much of the seamier side of local life, the narrator heads to New York City, where he works briefly in a paint factory before becoming involved with a radical political organization known as the Brotherhood. Although he rises to a position of leadership in that group, by the end of the novel he has become disillusioned with the regimentation and hypocrisy its members exhibit. As the narrator’s story concludes, he is living in isolation, determined to lead a more independent and genuinely authentic existence. Ellison’s novel is widely regarded as one of the most important works of full-length fiction by any African-American writer, and indeed the book is often seen as one of the most significant novels written by any American in the half-century following World War II. The book is often interpreted as a coming-of-age story or novel of development (a bildungsroman), in which the main character must undergo a series of tests, trials, rites of passage, and repeated disillusionments before reaching a more mature, more skeptical, and more autonomous way of thinking. At the end of the book, the narrator (whom critics sometimes call “Invisible Man” or even simply

“Invisible”) is living alone, unknown, and rent-free “in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century” (Invisible 5). Obviously his anonymous existence in the basement of a building reserved for whites is symbolic, and indeed the novel is full of symbolism, allegory, allusions, and suggestive imagery. The story, therefore, is not simply the tale of a single man but a representative narrative in which Ellison comments not only on the conditions of all American blacks but indeed on the human condition itself. The novel explores a wide variety of themes, topics, and motifs, and it is partly because of its exploration of these themes that it immediately attracted immense attention—attention that has only grown with the passage of years and decades. Commentators have called attention to many concepts and ideas that are crucial to Ellison’s novel. On the one hand (for instance), the book involves a literal geographical journey from the South to the North, but it also involves a far more important psychological journey in which the narrator grows from adolescence to manhood and from immature naïveté to mature skepticism and self-reliance. By the end of the book he is not only older but wiser, and although his wisdom has been born of a series of painful disillusionments and betrayals, he finally finds himself poised for authentic growth (although Ellison leaves his future unclear and even raises the possibility that the narrator may not entirely have overcome his external or even his internal limitations). The novel reflects the influence of the existential philosophy that was especially prominent during the mid-20th century and exemplified in the works of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and fiction writer Albert Camus, and the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Existentialists believed that human life exhibits no fundamental order, purpose, or significance and that existence therefore often seems meaningless and absurd. However, they also believed that each individual person has not only the opportunity but also the obligation to choose his or her own meaning—to live a life that is “authentic” in the sense that each act, and indeed one’s entire existence, is the result of free choice. Ellison’s narrator undergoes a kind of existential baptism by fi re: He tries

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to live according to a series of conventional, stereotyped roles that have essentially been imposed upon him by society. After each of those roles fails or disappoints him, he eventually learns that he must free himself from social dictates, make his own choices, and live his own life. At the end of the book he seems ready to do exactly that: He has recognized his own individual complexity and seems prepared to live an authentic life that will not involve self-betrayal. Ellison’s novel, then, is not simply “about” the problems of being black in a racist society (although it is certainly in part about that); it is also “about” the problem of being true to oneself in any society. Ellison did not want to write merely a “protest novel”; instead, he wanted to create a work that would confront some of the most basic and elemental dilemmas faced by all human beings, but especially by blacks, whose lives (he thought) particularly symbolized the challenges all people must confront. These challenges included constrictions placed on individuality (especially by racism); the limitations caused by narrow ways of thinking and the restrictions imposed by prescribed social roles; the risks of reacting to narrow thinking with equally narrow responses; the problems caused by failing to see clearly, whether that lack of vision involves perceptions of others, perceptions of oneself, or perceptions of society at large; and the need of all human beings to grow in knowledge and especially in self-understanding. The novel’s title character is a symbol of the special alienation suffered by blacks in American society, but he is also a symbol of the loneliness and frustration that lie at the core of any inauthentic existence. It is partly because Ellison managed to combine a compelling narrative of black experiences with a broader concern with “the human condition” that his book was so positively embraced by black and white readers alike. Ellison was praised for exploring the inner dimensions of his main character rather than treating him simply as sociological data; the book is a philosophical novel, not merely a piece of journalism that reports superficial facts. However, just as readers have found Ellison’s book compelling because of the themes it explores, so they have also been intrigued by its style, structure, tones, and techniques. The book has been compared to traditional slave narratives because it traces one person’s

movement not only from the South to the North but also from bondage to a kind of (limited and potential) freedom. At the same time, however, the novel has also been compared to such classics of Western literature as The Odyssey (since both involve lengthy journeys), The Divine Comedy (since both involve descents into a bewildering world of darkness and confusion), and Moby-Dick (since both are epic in size and scope and deal with an anonymous protagonist’s growth to maturity by way of disillusionment). In its focus on a corrupt, chaotic, and decaying culture, as well as in its stylistic diversity, use of symbolism, and emphasis on allusions, the book was obviously influenced by T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (one of Ellison’s favorite texts), and in its combination of realism and surrealism it shows Ellison’s reading of such modern authors as Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and especially Richard Wright, who composed the novella “The Man Who Lived Underground.” In addition to displaying the breadth and depth of Ellison’s reading, the novel reveals his familiarity with black folk culture, rural dialect, urban street lingo, and the richness of the American oral tradition, both black and white. Mark Twain, after all, was another of Ellison’s favorite writers, as was Ernest Hemingway—influences reflected in the humor of some parts of the novel and in the spare directness of other sections. Ellison blends straight “reporting” with dreamlike montages full of fantasies and fears; he recreates convincing dialect and invents credible dialogue at the same time that he employs resonant imagery, pervasive symbolism, and widespread allegorical phrasing. Thus Mr. Norton, the rich white trustee of the black college, is from the North; Homer Barbee, an old black man who gives a speech at the college, is blind, as is his namesake, the Greek poet Homer; a character named Jack is both literally and symbolically oneeyed; a nurturing woman named Mary is an obvious maternal figure; a major character who dies tragically is named Tod (the German word for “death”); and the list goes on and on. Likewise, important motifs recur throughout the book. Thus, chaos takes place in the famous “battle royal” segment early in the novel, but it also appears when the narrator visits a brothel while in college and in a riot near the end

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of the book. The narrator is shocked with electricity during the “battle royal,” and the same thing happens again (although to a worse degree) when he is hospitalized after moving north. The narrator is betrayed by the president of the southern college, but he is also betrayed by the leader of the northern Brotherhood. Ellison, in short, created a book that is very carefully designed in every way. It reflects a modernist style of writing that was becoming increasingly prominent at the time of this novel’s composition—a “mixed” style that went beyond naturalistic reporting and tried to transcend hard-boiled plainness by emphasizing symbolism and allegory. It is not a coincidence that Ellison’s book appeared at almost the same moment as Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—a book that is also full of resonant imagery, evocative symbols, emblematic actions, and iconographic characters. Hemingway’s novel, however, was short and relatively simple; Ellison was painting on an epic scale. Invisible Man is his effort to write a book with the same kind of cultural dimensions and intellectual depth as Moby-Dick. Many commentators felt at the time—and have continued to feel—that Ellison largely succeeded in his attempts to write a (if not the) great American novel. Admirers have praised the book for its vivid and complex characters, its wide stylistic range, its effective use of irony, its sometimes gripping narrative, its often surrealistic episodes, its inventiveness, its skillful use of symbols and imagery, its frequently nightmarish qualities, its detailed observations of life in Harlem and in the Deep South, and its expert recreation not only of elaborate verbal “set pieces” (such as the several lengthy speeches) but also of the rhythms and diction of day-to-day conversation. Nevertheless, despite the praise heaped on all these aspects of Ellison’s novel, the book has also attracted a good deal of censure. Some critics, for instance, have attacked the book for indulging too often in melodrama, for using phrasing that is overblown in some cases and dull in others, for relying too much on exposition (or explanation) and too little on drama, for being heavy-handed in its use of symbols, and for failing to provide convincingly detailed depictions of its characters, including even the protagonist. Some of the characters have been seen as too simplistic

or one-dimensional, and the novel has struck some readers as being too abstract, allegorical, intellectual, and even pretentious for its own good. Politically oriented critics sometimes accuse the book of being insufficiently radical, and the chapters on the Brotherhood were also often condemned—sometimes by readers who thought that Ellison had been unfair in depicting these Leftist radicals and sometimes by readers who felt that his satire, though deserved, was unconvincing. Numerous readers have objected to the ending of the book: “The Epilogue,” in their view, concludes on a naively affirmative and optimistic note—a note that seems to contradict much of the rest of the novel. It is possible, of course, that Ellison intended this note to be ironic; if he did, however, many readers clearly missed his point. Nevertheless, even commentators who have been strongly critical of Invisible Man have frequently conceded its ambitious and innovative nature, and as the decades have passed, dissenting voices have grown weaker and less numerous.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does Invisible Man both resemble and differ from Richard Wright’s novel Native Son? How are the protagonists different in their educational backgrounds, their personal ambitions, and their levels of intellectual development? Which book is more precisely focused on strictly racial themes? How are Leftist political organizations depicted in both works? Discuss the endings of the two novels. 2. Discuss the presentation of the theme of race relations in this novel and in William Faulkner’s Light in August. How are both the title character of Ellison’s novel and Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s book similar and/or different in their backgrounds, experiences, aspirations, and final fates? Discuss the roles of women in each novel, and discuss the presentation of socioeconomic class in each book. 3. Discuss the ways black life is presented in this book and in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How are women presented in each work? How is romance presented? Discuss the use of black dialect and folk traditions in both books. How are the plots of the two

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novels similar in their focus on the main character’s geographical movements and psychological development? How are the endings of the two books comparable?

“Brave Words for a Startling Occasion” (1953)

In this address delivered when Ellison accepted the 1953 National Book Award, he locates his novel Invisible Man in relation to past and present fiction, especially in relation to the novel of manners, the naturalistic novel, and the great moral novels of the 19th century. In style, technique, dialogue, and subject manner, Ellison not only sought complexity himself but also recommended it to others, particularly in the treatment of black people, racial issues, and the American national experience. Ellison begins by saying that if he were asked what he considered to be the most significant aspect of his novel Invisible Man, “I would reply: its experimental attitude, and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction” (Collected 151). In other words, he stresses the technical, structural, and stylistic innovations of his book, but he also emphasizes its old-fashioned concern with individual conduct and personal choices, particularly those of authors themselves. Writers of the so-called naturalistic school had emphasized that human beings were products of social forces and that they therefore had little control over their own lives. In contrast, Ellison—while acknowledging the achievements of naturalism—favors the example set by earlier writers, who “took a much greater responsibility for the condition of democracy” and whose works were “imaginative projections of the conflicts within the human heart which arose when the sacred principles of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights clashed with the practical exigencies of human greed and fear, hate and love” (Collected 152–153). Unfortunately, the only earlier writer Ellison specifically mentions as an exemplar of the ideals he has in mind is Mark Twain, although he does also commend William Faulkner as a more recent example worth emulating.

In the course of embracing this earlier standard of fictional excellence, Ellison explains why he could not embrace other models—models that included not only naturalism but also the “well-made” fiction associated with Henry James (which seemed too limited in subject matter) and the “hard-boiled” prose style of such writers as Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s name is never explicitly mentioned in the essay, but when Ellison mentions such traits as understatement and “monosyllabic utterance,” it is clear that he has Hemingway in mind (Collected 152). Although Ellison felt enormous admiration for Hemingway and expresses regard for the author’s prose style both here and elsewhere, he considered such a style too limited, too “embarrassingly austere,” to be useful to him in Invisible Man (Collected 152). Instead, he wanted to craft a kind of prose that would reflect the numerous complications of American speech—speech that Ellison calls “the rich babel of idiomatic expression around me, a language full of imagery and gesture and rhetorical canniness” (Collected 152). As he recounts the numerous elements that typify American ways of talking, it is clear that what Ellison prizes most in fiction (both in its style and in its substance) is complexity. He does not want his writing to be limited in any way—not in its subject, not in its phrasing, and certainly not by assumptions connected to the race of its author. He endorses a kind of fiction that takes ethical issues seriously and that rejects narrow or rigid prescriptions in either diction or topics. Paradoxically, the kind of writing he advocates is experimental and innovative in its stylistic range but traditional in its concern with moral issues.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Choose a particular chapter or a brief section from Invisible Man and discuss the ways it exemplifies the ideals Ellison champions in this essay. How is the chosen section innovative and complex in style? How does it reflect a wide range of American speech? In what ways does it focus on basic ethical problems? How (if at all) does Ellison achieve his ideal of creating a truly complicated and morally responsible work? 2. In this essay, Ellison names Mark Twain as a writer he particularly admires. Using Twain’s

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novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a test case, explain as precisely as possible why you think Ellison might have valued that book. What is it about the style, dialogue, settings, plot, and subject matter of that book that would win Ellison’s respect? How does Invisible Man resemble Huckleberry Finn in any of those ways?

“The World and the Jug” (1963, 1964) In this essay, which was originally composed as two separate exchanges with the noted critic Irving Howe, Ellison resists what he views as Howe’s pressure to conform to certain narrow stereotypes of what a black writer is and/or should be. He argues that although (or because) Howe is a Leftist, his views of black authors and of black literature are highly constricted; Howe expects such authors (Ellison alleges) to pattern themselves too closely after the example of Richard Wright, whereas Ellison contends that each writer is an individual and that the complexity of black American life cannot (and should not) be reduced to simplistic formulas. When Howe replied to Ellison’s response, Ellison replied in turn, this time in a more vigorous and sarcastic style. In this lengthy and important piece, Ellison elaborates on points he had already made in his 1953 address “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion.” In both works (and indeed throughout the decades following publication of Invisible Man) he insisted on the need for good writers and good writing to be complex, independent, and responsive to the real complications of modern life. He resisted any and all efforts to force him to march to tunes chosen by others, and he particularly resisted efforts to make his writing serve some prefashioned political or sociological agenda. He rejected any idea that a black author must write only about racial suffering or must write mainly as a form of protest or propaganda, and he argued that the life of blacks in the United States was much more complex—and much more dignified— than critics such as Howe tended to assume. The effects of racism on American blacks were (Ellison believed) extremely complicated and multifaceted, and while many of those effects were obviously enor-

mously negative, in some cases racist oppression had provoked toughness, irony, resilience, and strength of character that Howe’s view (which emphasized blacks as victims) failed to take into account. Ellison argues that Howe tends to view blacks as abstractions rather than as complex individuals, and he contends that “their resistance to provocation, their coolness under pressure, their sense of timing and their tenacious hold on the ideal of their ultimate freedom are indispensable values in the struggle” for civil rights “and are at least as characteristic of American Negroes as the hatred, fear, and vindictiveness” described by Wright and held up as a model for other black writers by Howe (Collected 161). Ellison argues that Wright himself—an extremely talented and complex man—is a perfect illustration of the fact that blacks cannot be pigeonholed but must be viewed (and treated) as individuals, and he contends that the cultural influences that help shape the best black writers are far more diverse and multicultural than Howe seems to assume. Ellison recounts his own intellectual growth and the valuable impact of authors (including many Europeans) on his own development, and in one of the most stinging sentences in the essay he asserts that “in his effort to resuscitate Wright, Irving Howe would designate the role which Negro writers are to play more rigidly than any Southern politician—and for the best of reasons” (Collected 167). Ellison, in short, rejects Howe’s ideas as condescending and demeaning, and when Howe replied indignantly to Ellison’s critique, Ellison became even more sarcastic: “It would seem . . . that [Howe] approves of angry Negro writers only until one questions his ideas” (Collected 168). The second half of Ellison’s essay is more witty, biting, colloquial, and humorous than the first, and it is hard not to sympathize with him when he says that he resents being instructed about how to be a “‘good Negro’” (Collected 172), whether the instruction is from a prejudiced white southerner or a well-intentioned white northern liberal such as Irving Howe.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Track down the two essays by Howe to which Ellison is here responding. (The essays are available in Howe’s book A World More Attractive.)

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Does Howe make any effective points? Is Ellison fair in his summation of and response to Howe’s arguments? Having read both Ellison and Howe, which man (in your opinion) makes the more effective logical case? Explain your response. Which essayist is the more effective writer? Explain your response. 2. Choose a work by Ellison other than Invisible Man and discuss the ways in which it exemplifies the ideals he outlines in this essay. How does it transcend narrow stereotypes of black writers and black writing in subject matter, style, tone, point of view, and “meaning”? Compare and contrast the chosen work by Ellison with a work by Richard Wright (perhaps one of his short stories). Relate the two works to the debate between Ellison and Howe.

“A Party Down the Square” (1996) Not published until after Ellison’s death but probably written in the late 1930s or early 1940s, “A Party Down the Square” is narrated by a young white man, who tells of being invited one night to a “party” in the town square of a small southern community—a “party” that turns out to be the impromptu public burning of a black man. As a storm blows up, an airplane flies low over the town; when it loses power, it clips the tops off trees and sends power lines falling to the ground, electrocuting a female bystander. After the plane regains its power, the distracted crowd returns its focus to executing the hapless black man, who is incinerated until nothing is left but a few bones and ashes. In this superb story, Ellison takes the unusual step of writing from the first-person perspective of a bigoted white character. The effect is powerful, for Ellison takes us inside the mind of a young man who simply takes his racism for granted, never bothering to question whether the brutality he describes might be wrong or immoral. Those questions are raised, however, in the mind of the reader: Ellison produces a stunning indictment of racism that is all the more effective because it is so indirect and implicit; the story never sounds preachy, propagandistic, or sentimen-

tal, because Ellison manages to stay so convincingly inside the head and voice of his white narrator. The style of the work is lean, crisp, clear, and colloquial; the influence of Hemingway is visible, for instance, in the brevity of the opening sentence and in the lengthy second sentence, with its repeated and’s and its matter-of-fact, reportorial tone (Flying Home 3). The sudden shift in the third sentence to unexpected paradox (“everybody was mad and quiet”) is made all the more wrenching by the abrupt introduction, at the very end of the sentence, of the word nigger. The real focus of the story becomes instantly if unexpectedly clear, and the care with which these opening sentences are crafted is typical of the skill and artistry exhibited by the entire work. Many factors combine to make the story both highly memorable and extremely effective. The setting, characters, and actions are all vividly described; the imagery is precise and haunting; dialect and dialogue are both credible and artfully employed; sentences alternate tellingly in length and rhythm; symbolism is subtly but expertly introduced; and narrative suspense never flags. As in much of Ellison’s fiction, sometimes the phrasing seems realistic, even mundane; at other times, surreal and grotesque. The sudden appearance of the plane, for instance, seems like an element of a nightmare. Despite seeming almost too convenient and implausible, Ellison manages to keep it believable, exploiting it to powerfully ironic effect. Thus the plane knocks down power lines that incinerate a white woman even before the black man is burned alive, and the passage in which Ellison describes her body is typical of the vividness of the story as a whole: I could smell the flesh burning. The first time I’d ever smelled it. I got up close and it was a woman. It must have killed her right off. . . . Her white dress was torn, and I saw one of her tits hanging out in the water and her thighs. . . . The shock had turned the woman almost as black as the nigger. (Flying Home 7)

The brevity of the opening sentence, the use of a fragment in the second, the shock of discovering that the victim is one of the women who had gone

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see the black man burned, the use of white and black imagery, the crude reference to the woman’s “tits,” the mention of her thighs almost as an afterthought, and, especially, the ironic observation that she had been burned as black as the black man she had arrived to see burned alive—all these factors contribute to the effectiveness of this very brief passage, and this effectiveness is typical of the impact of the story as a whole. When it comes time for Ellison to describe the burning of the black man, he does so in ways that are literally sickening: Even the narrator vomits in the aftermath of the execution, and few readers are likely to be able to erase from their minds his description of the “nigger’s” burning body: He kicked so hard that the platform, which was burning too, fell in, and he rolled out of the fire at my feet. I jumped back so he wouldn’t get on me. I’ll never forget it. Every time I eat barbeque I’ll remember that nigger. His back was just like a barbecued hog. I could see the prints of his ribs where they start around from his backbone and curve down and around. It was a sight to see, that nigger’s back. (Flying Home 9)

This passage typifies, once more, the brilliance with which the entire story is composed. The narrator does not want to be touched physically by the burning corpse, but obviously he has been touched in a deeper sense: The body is “at [his] feet” both literally and symbolically; the dead man is “on” him in ways he does not quite comprehend. He compares the black man to a barbequed hog in a way that is both believable and shocking, and when he describes the burning corpse, he slips unconsciously into the present tense (“the prints of his ribs where they start”). He is simultaneously fascinated, disgusted, fearful, and indifferent: He is repelled by the incinerated body but never stops to question the morality of the deed. By putting the words of this story in the mouth of such a character, Ellison made a stunningly effective narrative decision, and the result is one of the most powerful short stories ever crafted by Ellison or any other modern American writer.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this tale with Richard Wright’s story titled “Big Boy Leaves Home.” How are the two works comparable in plot and theme but distinctive in their resolutions and points of view? Discuss the structures of the two works; how and why is Wright’s story lyrical and then intense, and how and why is Ellison’s story intense almost immediately? 2. Read this story in conjunction with Claude McKay’s sonnet “The Lynching,” and then discuss the forms of the two works (story v. sonnet), the different kinds of diction (or phrasing) they use, the distinct perspective each adopts, and the particular kind of imagery each employs. Do you fi nd one work more effective than the other? If so, explain why; if not, explain how each is effective in its own way.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ELLISON AND HIS WORK 1. Choose a small portion (a page or two or three) from one of Ellison’s works and then discuss, in as much detail as possible, the factors that make that section either effective, ineffective, or some combination of both. Discuss such matters as diction, imagery, symbolism, figurative language, sentence structure, sentence rhythms, characterization, use of setting, development of plot, and development of suspense. 2. Although Ellison is remembered mainly as the author of Invisible Man, he published a number of short stories during his life, and other stories were published after his death. Choose one of those stories (preferably one that has received little attention) and examine it in detail. What factors make it worth reading? Is it comparable in themes, style, and/or quality with Invisible Man? What, if any, flaws or defects does it exhibit? 3. Choose one of Ellison’s works and discuss the political implications of that text. What kind of ideal society does Ellison seem to envision? What would be the social, economic, and cultural traits of that society? In what ways did the United States

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of Ellison’s time live up to and/or fall short of the kinds of ideals Ellison seems to endorse? Ellison’s depiction of women in Invisible Man has been a source of some controversy. Some critics argue that he employs stereotypes of women that are usually negative and narrow. What do you think of this charge? How are women presented in one or more other works by Ellison? Choose three of Ellison’s shorter works of fiction and discuss the ways whites are presented in those works. Are there any common patterns in the ways whites are depicted? Do you detect any underlying attitudes in Ellison’s presentations of whites? Is his presentation of them “fair”? Read Ellison’s posthumous novel titled Juneteenth and then discuss its merits and defects. Why is this book not usually considered as successful as Invisible Man? How does it compare to the earlier work in terms of such features as plot, characterization, style, structure, and techniques? Choose one of the many essays in which Ellison discusses the role, responsibilities, and artistic ideals of the black writer, and then, after choosing one of his fictional works, discuss that work in light of the ideals advocated in the selected essay. How did Ellison try to live up to his own goals for African-American writers? How and to what extent did he succeed and/or fall short in achieving those goals? Race is obviously a major theme in much of Ellison’s fiction, but what role is played by economic status and/or social class? How are the issues of class and race related? Choose one work by Ellison and examine these matters in detail. To what degree, and in what ways, does Ellison use his fictional works to advocate particular social, economic, or political positions? Read one of Ellison’s many essays on music, and then discuss how his comments on that art form are (or are not) relevant to his ideas about writing. In what ways, for instance, does Ellison’s fiction show the influence of jazz? What kinds of music did Ellison most value, and how do his tastes in music relate to his tastes in literature?

10. Robert J. Butler’s anthology (see Works Cited and Additional Resources) contains a number of essays that are critical of Ellison, and more such commentary can be found in other sources. Study the kinds of charges that were leveled against Ellison over the years, and then discuss whether or not you think those charges were fair, accurate, and/or persuasive. How (if at all) would you defend Ellison against the attacks by his critics? WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Invisible Man: Modern Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. ———. Ralph Ellison. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 2003. Callahan, John F., ed. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Butler, Robert J., ed. The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Edited by John F. Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995. ———. Flying Home and Other Stories. Edited by John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1996. ———. “Interview with Ralph Ellison.” Paris Review 8. no. 8 (Spring 1955). Available online: URL: http://theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/ prmMID/5053. Accessed May 21, 2007. ———. Invisible Man. New York: Modern Library, 1994. Possnock, Ralph, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. “Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Available online. URL: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/ ellison-main.html. Accessed March 25, 2009. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 2007. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Ralph Ellison.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http:// web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/ellison.html. Accessed May 21, 2007. Tracy, Steven C. A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Robert C. Evans

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–

)

It would have been nice had we provided a nice warm stable and we were feeding them regularly—the care and feeding of poets. (interview with Jeff Troiano)

L

awrence Ferlinghetti, one of the leading voices of the so-called Beat Generation, was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, New York, to a Jewish mother and an Italian father. His was not an ideal childhood, and by the time he was a year old, his father had died and his mother, Clemence, had been diagnosed as insane and had been admitted to a state mental hospital. At that point, the child was sent to live with his uncle and aunt, Ludwig and Emily Mendes-Monsanto. Their marriage, however, began deteriorating almost as soon as Lawrence began to live with them, with the end result that young Lawrence was put in an orphanage until Emily fi nally separated from Ludwig and took Lawrence to live in Bronxville, New York. Ferlinghetti began writing poetry at the age of 16 and soon enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving during World War II. He attended the University of North Carolina, graduating with a B.A., and then earned his M.A. from Columbia. He then moved to Paris, to attend the Sorbonne, where he took his Ph.D. Significantly, the title of his dissertation was “The City as Symbol in Modern Poetry,” reflecting his concerns with the urban landscape and the role it played in 20th-century poetry. After receiving his Ph.D., he moved to San Francisco in the early 1950s, a move that would impact his career perhaps more than any other decision he would make. In the San Francisco of the 1950s, there was an artistic movement called the San Francisco Renais-

sance, an explosion of a new kind of art and poetry. The poet Kenneth Rexroth is considered by most literary historians to have been the founder of this movement, out of which sprang poetry with an avant-garde flair. Rexroth, anticipating the Beat poets, was one of the fi rst American poets to explore Asian poetic forms, such as the haiku, as well as being influenced by jazz music. The artistic atmosphere in San Francisco by the time Ferlinghetti arrived was one of exuberant experimentation. There were new things happening musically, artistically, and literarily on the West Coast at this time. Once he arrived in San Francisco, he met Peter Martin, a sociology instructor who also had a passion for both fi lm and books, and, in 1953, they founded the City Lights bookstore, which today still operates in its original location (http:// www.citylights.com). It was the nation’s fi rst allpaperback bookstore; Martin and Ferlinghetti took the name City Lights from the Charlie Chaplin movie of the same name. The bookstore is considered today to be a significant historical landmark of America’s counterculture. In 1955, Ferlinghetti started a book publishing business allied with the bookstore, City Lights Publishing, which published cheap paperback books by poets and other authors in order to make poetry more accessible to the public, such as the small volumes of poetry published under the Pocket Poets Series imprint. While Ferlinghetti was

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starting these businesses, he was also writing, and he published Pictures of the gone world with City Lights Publishing in 1955. This volume garnered some critical attention, but Ferlinghetti’s next book would be his big breakthrough. In 1958 City Lights published Coney Island of the Mind, one of the highest-selling single-author poetry books of the latter part of the 20th century. In the Prologue Ferlinghetti explains the concept behind the book’s fi rst section: The title of this book is taken from Henry Miller’s Into the Night Life. It is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems as I wrote them—as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul.

This fi rst section contains 29 poems written on a number of different subjects, including childhood memories of candy stores; meditations on artists and writers, such as Francisco Goya and Dante Alighieri; and ruminations on the power of art and the role of religion in American life. The second section, titled Oral Messages, was a group of seven longer poems that were conceived, Ferlinghetti said, “specifically for jazz accompaniment and as such should be considered as simultaneously spoken ‘oral messages’ rather than as poems written for the printed page.” The third section of the book included a selection of poems from his previous work, Pictures of the gone world. The book was a huge success; by the time the hardback edition was published 10 years later in 1968, it had already sold 600,000 copies, an extraordinary number for a volume of poetry. Ferlinghetti’s interest in the fusion of jazz and poetry reflected the influence of the growing Beat movement. The Beats were primarily a group of writers who, beginning in the late 1940s, congregated in New York City, including Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. These writers were dissatisfied with the status quo; much of their writing rebels against the conformist attitudes of mid-century American culture. During the 1950s, many of the Beats traveled to the

West Coast and ultimately to San Francisco, where Ferlinghetti became associated with them. Characteristics of Beat literature generally are a dissatisfaction with the status quo, anger or frustration at the more confi ning or limiting aspects of conservative American culture, a romantic longing for or attachment to nature, and the idea of the journey as a means of self-discovery. Ferlinghetti’s own work reflects these; at times his poems feature what might be termed a “Beatnik” speaker and hipster language. His poem “Sometime during Eternity,” for example, features a Beatnik’s version of the life of Jesus Christ, wherein the speaker, describing the aftermath of Christ’s crucifi xion, says that his followers are always “calling Him to come down and sit in on their combo as if he is the king cat who’s got to blow / or they can’t quite make it.” Ferlinghetti continued his association with the Beats during the 1950s and 1960s, even publishing Ginsberg’s “Howl” and being arrested on obscenity charges for doing so. His interest in the more avant-garde aspects of the movement are reflected in the way he often performed his poetry with jazz music accompaniment and in his interest in poetry as an oral art form. He continued publishing both his own and other writers’ poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. He even made the spoken word record Tyrannus Nix? in 1970. As the Beat movement waned in the 1970s and the power of the counterculture began to diminish, Ferlinghetti kept publishing. In 1973, New Directions published his Open Eye, Open Heart, a volume that contains poems that are still in “A World Awash with Fascism and Fear,” in which the poem’s speaker is appalled at the number of people who are oppressed and, in the poem’s fi nal lines, tells us that the world “still cries out for freedom.” As a writer, Ferlinghetti continually addresses the problems of class, social injustice, and the oppression of marginalized groups. He still publishes regularly, and New Directions published his most recent book, Americus Book I, in 2004. In addition to being a poet and a publisher, Ferlinghetti has become a cultural and literary icon. In 1998, he was named San Francisco’s poet laureate, and in 2003 he was awarded the Robert

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Frost Memorial Medal and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As visual artists are often the subject of his poems, it is not surprising that he is also a talented and prolific painter, regularly showing his work around the country and in Europe. In his 90s, Ferlinghetti retains a passion for social justice and for various liberal causes. Perhaps most important of all, he possesses a never-wavering passion for poetry. In 2005, he was awarded the Literarian Award for outstanding service to the literary community, and in part of his acceptance speech he refers both to American culture and to the power of art: This culture may globalize the world, devastating indigenous historic traditions, but it is not our mainstream culture. The true mainstream is made, not of oil, but of writers and readers, musicians and composers, editors and publishers, bookstores and libraries and universities, and all the institutions that support them.

Ferlinghetti’s dedication to the craft of writing reflects the way he has spent his life. His reputation rests chiefly on his passion for poetry and his belief in the ability of poetry to transform the world.

“Constantly Risking Absurdity” (1958) “Constantly Risking Absurdity” is essentially an ars poetica, a poem whose subject is the art of poetry, a form practiced by poets dating from Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, who was born on December 8, 65 B.C., and died on November 27, 8 B.C.). In this particular poem, Ferlinghetti depicts the art of poetry as a high-wire act, a metaphor that captures the precarious nature of both walking wires and creating poetry. The fi rst line reminds us, in fact, that creation involves an inherent risk, a risk related to his readers/audience and whether they will consider the poet to be absurd. The beginning of the poem seems almost a warning, with Ferlinghetti implying that artists risk absurdity especially when they perform “above the heads” (l. 2) of their audience. Ironically, Ferlinghetti uses the metaphor

of the high-wire act to demonstrate how the poet must always remain grounded. We are told that the poet performs “entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks” but must remain grounded and not mistake “any thing for what it may not be.” Ferlinghetti here demonstrates, both literally and metaphorically, the delicate balance a poet must maintain between highly charged rhetoric and the realities of the concrete world. It is the poet’s job, we are told, to “perceive taut truth” and to “advance toward that still higher perch / where Beauty stands and waits” (ll. 11–12). The fi nal artistic goal, according to Ferlinghetti, is to achieve beauty. Such an achievement, however, Ferlinghetti implies in the fi nal lines, can be difficult. Calling the artist a “little charleychaplin man,” Ferlinghetti tells us that he “may or may not catch / her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence.” The poem is therefore a testament to the difficulty of rendering beauty in language. Ferlinghetti documents the artistic struggle using the metaphor of the high-wire act in part because of the difficulty most artists face in achieving their aesthetic objectives. Because the poem has for its setting the circus, however, Ferlinghetti also comments upon the way the poet is viewed by the rest of society. By setting the poem under the big top, he also implies that poetry is nothing more than a side show to most of the public. The phrase that Ferlinghetti uses in the beginning of the poem, “above the heads,” confi rms this. In the end, this poem demonstrates both the absurdity and the seriousness of artistic endeavors.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Why does Ferlinghetti refer to Charlie Chaplin in this poem? Who was Chaplin, and how might he be related to Ferlinghetti’s concept of the poet? 2. According to this poem, what is the role of the artist? What essential functions does Ferlinghetti see the artist performing? What does Ferlinghetti seem to feel about the artistic life? 3. Read Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Ars Poetica” (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/ prmMID/15222). Then, compare MacLeish’s

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poem with Ferlinghetti’s. What vision of art and poetry do they share? How do they differ? Next, consult a translation of Horace’s “On the Art of Poetry” (http://www.classicpersuasion.org/ pw/horace/horacepo.htm). After analyzing and comparing and contrasting all three, define ars poetica as a genre.

“Dove Sta Amore” (1958) This poem is a departure for Ferlinghetti. Instead of the long, spidery lines and sometimes freewheeling feel of his typical verse despite its serious undertones, “Dove Sta Amore” is a playful, lyrical poem, which features Ferlinghetti performing sonic variations on the Italian phrase dove sta amore, translated as “here lies love.” While the poem appears playful, however, there is also a serious undercurrent, so that it is not merely a series of playful variations but also a profound meditation on the nature of both love and language. The poem begins with a refrain that will be repeated at the poem’s conclusion with a few slight variations: “Dove sta amore / Where lies love / Dove sta amore / Here lies love” (ll. 1–4). The poem thus begins with both a fairly regular rhythm and a profound question prompted by the speaker’s search for love. The middle of the poem sees the speaker again playing with language but also making some profound statements about the nature of desire. After mentioning that a ring dove, a bird, is singing a love song with “lyrical delight,” the speaker tells us: “Hear love’s hillsong / Love’s true willsong / Love’s low plainsong / Too sweet painsong / In passages of night” (ll. 7–11). Ferlinghetti here demonstrates a subtle understanding of how rhythm and meter can add to a poem’s complexity. Note how lines 7–10 have exactly the same rhythm and then note how, despite the sameness of rhythm, each line expresses a slightly different emotion. The lines that end in hillsong and willsong seem somehow positive, implying that love’s song can be sung from a hilltop or in the countryside and that a love song possesses a lover’s “true” will. Even though the rhythm stays the same, however, lines 8 and 9 have an almost despairing

tinge, indicating that the love song is low and plain, and that it may be too self-indulgent (“too sweet”) and painful. The conclusion of the poem repeats the opening refrain with a few minor variations: “Dove sta amore / here lies love / The ring dove love / Dove sta amore / here lies love” (ll. 12–16). By mimicking the opening refrain, Ferlinghetti not only imbues the poem with a songlike feel, but also lends the poem a circular feel, as if implying that the cycle of desire is never-ending. Ferlinghetti demonstrates his versatility with this poem but also, with relatively simple form and composition, reminds us that love is an often complex and elusive emotion.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare “Dove Sta Amore” with the anonymous medieval lyrics “Western Wind” and “My Lief Is Faren in Londe”: “Western Wind” Western wind, when will thou blow The small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again “My Lief Is Faren in Londe” My lief is faren in londe– Allas, why is she so? And I am so sore bonde I may nat come her to. She hath myn herte in holde Wherever she ride or go— With trewe love a thousand folde.

What are the moods of each poem? How has Ferlinghetti adapted the older lyric conventions to his own love song? 2. How does rhythm function in this poem? How does Ferlinghetti use repetition and rhyme in concert with the poem’s subject matter?

“I Am Waiting” (1958) “I Am Waiting” is a list poem, a type of poem in which the poet provides a catalog of objects or

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events, generally all pertaining to a single theme. In this particular poem, Ferlinghetti presents a speaker waiting for a number of events to occur. Most of the events the speaker catalogs are related to either the political or the artistic realm, and the speaker often mixes genuine sociopolitical concerns with sometimes-humorous popular culture references. At one point, for example, the speaker says: “I am waiting / for them to prove / that God is really American / and I am seriously waiting / for Billy Graham and Elvis Presley / to exchange roles seriously” (ll. 32–37). Here, the speaker uses humor to address a pressing topic: the way that Americans defi ne themselves as a religious people. The fact that the speaker is “waiting” for someone to prove God is American implies both that no one has done it yet and that he may not agree with people who think that God really is American. The desire to see Elvis Presley, a famous rock musician and pop culture icon, and Billy Graham, a wellknown evangelist, change places also reveals the speaker’s skepticism regarding the power of religion, implying that religion may be no more than show business or mere entertainment. There is clearly a skeptical tone in this poem, but just as clearly, the repetition of the phrase “I am waiting” also implies earnestness, a desire to see things change and a hope that they eventually will. There is also an underlying seriousness in this poem, indicated by the relative importance of the events the speaker wishes to see occur. Later in the poem, for instance, the speaker tells us that he is waiting “for the atomic tests to end,” “for things to get much worse / before they improve,” and “for the human crowd / to wander off a cliff somewhere / clutching its atomic umbrella” (ll. 57, 58–59, 63–65). The references to atomic war/ energy and conditions getting worse reflect the concerns of many Americans during the cold war, and this speaker clearly believes that some sort of catastrophic nuclear event will occur. Near the poem’s conclusion, the speaker becomes less concerned with the political and more concerned with the artistic. Referring to works by Keats and Shelley, two romantic poets, he says, “I am waiting / for some strains of unpremeditated art / to shake

my typewriter,” and he is waiting for “the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn / to catch each other up at last / and embrace” (ll. 153–155, 161–163). Thus, the latter part of the poem is more hopeful, and the implicit argument of the poem is that it is perhaps art that can redeem or rescue humanity from itself. It is art, the speaker hopes, that will provide that for which the speaker is ultimately waiting, a “renaissance of wonder” (l. 166).

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does the repetition of the phrase I am waiting help construct the tone of the poem? What is the tone of the poem? What does the speaker seem to want most of the things he lists? 2. Identify all of the things that the speaker wants that are related to religion. What is the speaker’s attitude toward religion?

“In Golden Gate Park That Day” (1958) This poem is set in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. It describes part of a day that an older couple spends at the park but is not simply a straightforward story about two elderly people. The poem was written in the 1950s, at a time when the so-called counterculture was beginning in America, a growing movement that was dissatisfied with the status quo in this country. The couple, as Ferlinghetti describes them, seem to be members of that culture, or at least two people who do not seem typical of elderly people of the 1950s. Ferlinghetti tells us in the opening lines that “a man and his wife were coming along / thru the enormous meadow which was the meadow of the world” (ll. 1–2). The “meadow of the world” to which Ferlinghetti refers could imply many things. It could be that, as is often the case with the elderly, Ferlinghetti is implying their world has shrunk and that they have relatively simple needs, as evidenced by the fact that they are carrying only a “beat-up flute” and “grapes.” It could also be that the park in which the poem is set is either a metaphor for the entire world or a microcosm of it. As the poem progresses, the park appears as a kind of paradise: “a very still

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spot where the trees dreamed / and seemed to have been waiting thru all time for them” (ll. 9–10). Initially, then, Ferlinghetti appears to be painting an engaging picture of a couple taking their ease among the pastoral pleasures of the park. However, as the poem progresses, we encounter increasingly troubling language. The speaker notes, for example, that the couple sat down on the grass “without looking at each other” and repeats that same phrase one line later when telling us that they ate oranges without looking at one another as well. Later, the man falls asleep without saying anything to his wife, and the wife is left to watch the birds flying in the air. After the man is asleep, the speaker tells us the wife “lay there looking up at nothing” as if she feels lost and disconnected not only from her spouse but also from the world. The last image of the poem is the wife lying on the grass, fi ngering the old flute, and fi nally looking over at her husband. This is not, however, a look of love or affection. The speaker notes that she looks at him “without any particular expression except a certain awful look / of terrible depression” (ll. 21–22). The two, the speaker seems to be saying, feel lost and disconnected, as if the hopes they had both for their relationship and for their lives are dashed, ending in disappointment. In this poem, Ferlinghetti laments the loss of both individual happiness and romantic love. It is implied that the couple has been together for a long time. The fact that they no longer look at each other indicates their feelings of alienation and unhappiness, perhaps not just about the way their relationship has turned out, but also at the way the world has. In this sense, “Golden Gate Park” can be read as a fallen paradise.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Late in the poem, the speaker mentions that the birds the old woman sees may be “questioning existence” or “trying to recall something forgotten.” How do those descriptions of the birds relate to the poem’s theme? What forgotten thing might the birds be trying to recall? 2. Compare this poem to “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats. How are the moods

of the poems similar? How do the settings in each poem affect the speakers’ mood or tone of voice?

“In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See” (1958) “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See” is also a meditation on a work of art, this time referring to works by the great Spanish painter Francisco Goya, who lived and painted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His work is known for being dramatic and for often focusing on individuals or groups of people in dramatic situations. In this poem, Ferlinghetti makes an argument similar to the one in “Monet’s Lilies Shuddering,” an argument about the transcendence and applicability of art. What draws the speaker of the poem to Goya’s paintings is the way in which they present the “people of the world / exactly at the moment when they fi rst attained the title of ‘suffering humanity’ ” (ll. 1–2). It is the explicit moment of human suffering that captures the speaker’s imagination and draws him into Goya’s paintings. The speaker describes in vivid detail the suffering he witnesses in these paintings, telling us that the people he sees “writhe upon the page in a veritable rage of adversity / Heaped up groaning with babies and bayonets under cement skies” (ll. 3–4). The dramatic scenes the speaker is witnessing capture his imagination to the point that he believes they might be real. At this point, the poem takes a sudden turn, and the setting of the poem is no longer Goya’s work but America. Goya’s figures “are so bloody real,” the speaker tells us, “it is as if they still existed / And they do / Only the landscape is changed” (ll. 4–6). The change that the speaker notes is his own shift of perspective from the scenes in Goya’s paintings to scenes of contemporary America. He insists that the people in Goya’s painting are now part of America’s urban landscape, telling us, “They are the same people only further from home on freeways fi fty lanes wide on a concrete continent” (l. 8). The shift in setting is significant, because it

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highlights the fact that although the scenery has changed, the people, their struggles, and the desolation of their surroundings have not; they are now simply residing in a different kind of desolate landscape: America. Ferlinghetti makes two significant points in this poem: one, that works of art, despite being painted centuries ago, are still aesthetically and culturally relevant today, and, two, that present-day America and the people residing in it seem to be no better off than those human figures who are suffering in Goya’s paintings. Ferlinghetti thus implies that art can be a vehicle for social change if we pay attention to the lessons it attempts to teach us and apply those lessons to the modern world that we inhabit.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes” with “Monet’s Lilies Shuddering.” What differences do you note in Ferlinghetti’s views regarding the power of art? 2. According to the poem’s speaker, what are the chief functions of art? 3. Compare “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes” with John Keats’s “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” What attitudes does Keats have toward older works of poetry? How does Keats’s stance compare with the attitude of the speaker in Ferlinghetti’s poem?

“The Old Italians Dying” (1979) In this long, proselike poem, Ferlinghetti pays homage to the older Italian immigrants of San Francisco and laments their passing. The poem, however, mourns more than the passing of a few Italian individuals; it grieves for the passing of a way of life. The speaker of the poem is observing old Italians around the city of San Francisco. Through his descriptions it is possible to envision not only the men themselves, but also their attachments to older ways and their homeland. The speaker at one point tells us that there are “the ones who loved Mussolini the old fascists the / ones who loved

Garibaldi the old anarchists reading L’Umanita / Nuova the ones who loved Sacco & Vanzetti” (ll. 24–26). These old Italians have retained cultural attachments to their country instead of adapting to American ways; Mussolini and Garibaldi were famous Italian revolutionaries, and Sacco and Vanzetti were two Italian anarchists who may have been wrongly convicted and executed for a murder in Massachusetts. The speaker sees a kind of dignity in the way the Italian immigrants cling to their culture and is clearly sad at their passing; “they are almost gone now,” he says at one point. The poem is also fi lled with images of death. The speaker notes a funeral procession and says “the black hired hearses draw up the black limousines,” telling us that “the family mourners step out in stiff suits” and that “the widows walk so slowly up the steps of the cathedral fi shnet veils drawn down leaning hard on darkcloth arms” (ll. 35, 40–42). In this scene, we see all of the typical trappings of a funeral, the veils worn by widows, the widows themselves, and the black hearses, among other things. The poem, however, concerns more than the literal death of an Italian immigrant, or, for that matter many Italian immigrants. The death to which Ferlinghetti refers is the death of a way of life and an entire immigrant culture, and he has written this poem to call attention to their plight. The poem, in fact, is fi lled with images of grief. Near the poem’s conclusion, the speaker focuses not only on the passing of the immigrants, but also on the fact that all of the Italian immigrants who are still alive seem only to be waiting for death themselves. We are told in the fi nal lines that all the old men do is wait; they are waiting “for the bocce ball to stop rolling” and “waiting for the bell to stop tolling & tolling” and for the “unfi nished Paradiso story.” In the end, Ferlinghetti tells us, these men are bereft of hope and are waiting only for their own deaths. But the poem can also be read as a call to action. One of its underlying motives, perhaps, is to encourage us to examine cultures or groups of people with which we might be familiar, and fight to preserve them, or at the very least to see and understand them.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare this poem to Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” What specific characteristics of the group of people mourned in each poem do the poets praise or lament? What seems to be Tate’s attitude toward the Confederate dead, and how does that attitude contrast with Ferlinghetti’s attitude toward the old Italians? 2. Read Philip Levine’s poem “To Cipriano, in the Wind” as a companion piece to “Old Italians Dying.” What is Levine’s view of the immigrant experience? Many readers might view Levine’s poem as more “personal.” Why might a reader think this, and how does reading the Levine poem alter your view of Ferlinghetti’s?

“A Dark Portrait” (1984) “A Dark Portrait” is another poem that refers to a work of art, this time a novel. The poem is a short, engaging portrait of a young woman whom the speaker has apparently known, which contains unusual descriptions of the young woman’s character and behavior. We are told in the beginning of the poem, “She always said ‘tu’ in such a way / as if she wanted to sleep with you / or had just had a most passionate orgasm” (ll. 1–3). The way the speaker describes the woman indicates perhaps a false sense of sophistication or worldliness. The woman employs a French word, tu, marking her as someone who uses her familiarity with other languages as a way to appear worldly and educated. It also appears as if her sexuality is at least in part deliberately crafted. The speaker therefore implies that the young woman is not quite who she seems to be, as is confi rmed later in the poem. The speaker tells us that “she / was really like Nora in Nightwood / long-gaited and restless as a mare” (ll. 5–7). The Nightwood to which the speaker refers is a modernist novel written by Djuna Barnes and published in 1936. It concerns two disillusioned women who are dissatisfied with their lives and who meet for a brief, seemingly perfect romantic

encounter, but many entanglements and disappointments result. Nora Flood is the name of one of the women and it is to her that the speaker is alluding. In the novel, Nora is generally the more honest and idealistic person, again implying that the woman in the poem is less sophisticated than she at fi rst tries to appear. The poem ends with two distinct images of the woman, one when she is younger and the other later in her life. While the images may initially appear to be incongruous, both images are of someone searching for that which she cannot fi nd. The young woman cannot fi nd a suitable lover, and, it is implied, because she spends her youth in a vain search for a lover who will satisfy her, she spends the end of her life not among people, but animals. Some readers might see the conclusion of the poem as positive since at least the woman has found some sort of companionship. The fact that the young woman is described as a “mare” in the poem and ends up among horses may also imply that she has found, when near the end of her life, the place where she belongs. The poem could also be read as a meditation on the futility of seeking the ideal lover in a world where ideal people of any sort do not exist. The ambiguity of the ending lends itself to either interpretation and indicates the sophisticated way that Ferlinghetti writes.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the poem’s conclusion. Do you think the woman fi nally found peace or happiness? Why or why not? 2. What do you think the poem is saying about the nature of desire? If we, as humans, know that the ideal person/lover does not exist, why do we keep searching for the ideal? What does Ferlinghetti seem to think about those who seek for the ideal partner? 3. Compare “A Dark Portrait” with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun”). How do the speakers in each poem view the notion of perfection or an ideal other? What solutions does each seem to be proposing about the dilemma of the search for the ideal?

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“Monet’s Lilies Shuddering” (1988) This poem is a profound meditation on art and the way it affects the viewer. Ferlinghetti sets the poem in the Chicago Art Institute; the main works of art to which the poem refers are the many paintings of lilies executed by the impressionist painter Claude Monet. The poem, though, is less a celebration of art per se, and more a meditation on how its enduring power is made manifest years, even centuries, after the painter himself has died. In fact, Ferlinghetti opens the poem using just that idea: “Monet never knew / he was painting his ‘Lilies’ for / a lady from the Chicago Art Institute / who went to France and fi lmed today’s lilies” (ll. 1–5). In these opening lines, the speaker emphasizes the fact that the artist has no idea how long his art will last or how it will influence other people, implying that the power of art in part lies in its ability to transcend the age in which it is created. The speaker also tells us that there are many of Monet’s paintings at the museum, making it likely that this is an exhibit of his paintings of lilies; there are “rooms and rooms / of waterlilies,” he tells us (ll. 12–13). In addition to the ability of art to transcend the conditions of its creation, another of the poem’s main themes is simply the dedication and wonder any great artist possesses. We are told that Monet returned to the water lily pond near Giverny, France, for “twenty years” and that his dedication to painting the lilies “gives us the impression / that he floated thru life on them / and their reflections” (ll. 19–21). The artist’s dedication to his craft, the speaker implies, allows him almost to be propelled through his life by his art. This, however, is not Ferlinghetti’s only point. At the poem’s conclusion, the speaker relates other things that Monet could not know, including the fact that we would reflect on his paintings, and the fact that “John Cage would be playing a / ‘Cello with Melody-driven Electronics’ / tonight at the University of Chicago / And making those Lilies shudder and shed / black light” (ll. 26–30). The John Cage to whom the speaker refers is a composer of music whose pieces often call for both standard symphonic instruments and

electronic instruments, such as synthesizers. We are thus left with what might seem an incongruous image, Cage’s postmodern musical compositions and Monet’s lilies. However, Ferlinghetti demonstrates again that temporal categories such as the past and the present do not typically apply to art that can transcend both time (Monet’s lilies) and place (the concert hall out of which Cage’s music fi lters to fi nd and “shudder” the lilies). The poem therefore encourages us to recognize and honor the transcendent power of all art.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare “Monet’s Lilies Shuddering” to Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto.” How do Browning’s attitudes toward art differ from Ferlinghetti’s? What power does art have in the Browning piece? Is it similar or dissimilar to the power of Monet’s work in the Ferlinghetti piece? 2. Why does Ferlinghetti mention music? How does the speaker of the poem feel about the power of music, and is the image of the music making the lilies shudder a positive one? What power does the speaker believe music has?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON FERLINGHETTI AND HIS WORK 1. Write a well-researched paper on the Beat generation, using the Ferlinghetti poems here, Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. In your investigation, defi ne what makes these figures “Beat” writers: what qualities their works share, what ideas they have in common, and what social concerns they all address. 2. One of the characteristics that make Ferlinghetti’s works so accessible is that he uses everyday language to articulate his themes. Yet some see his critique of social problems in America as being too sharply satirical, offending readers’ notions of nation and of patriotism. He might argue that becoming a radical activist made his voice known. Others, however, might argue

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that his activism alienates the very readers he is trying to reach. After reading the poems, write a well-developed essay that takes a stand on Ferlinghetti’s “activism.” 3. Read Ferlinghetti’s novel Her, taking into account the free-association narrative style. Next, read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, noting the narrative strategies Kerouac employs. Then, fi nd a couple of reviews of each of the books. Finally, hypothesize why the books were received so differently. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Bartlett, Lee. ed. The Beats: Essays in Criticism. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1981. Charters, Ann. “The Beats: Literary Bohemianism in Postwar America, Pts. I and II.” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 16. Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark/Gale, 1983. Cherkovski, Neeli. Ferlinghetti: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Foster, Edward Halsey. Understanding the Beats. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. French, Warren G. The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. New York: Twayne, 1991. Herron, Don. The Literary World of San Francisco and Its Environs. San Francisco: City Lights, 1985. Holmes, John Clellon. Representative Men. Fayeteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988. Hopkins, Crale D. “The Poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Reconsideration.” Italian Americana 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 59–76. Kherdian, David. Six Poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. Fresno, Calif.: Giligia Press, 1967.

“Lawrence Ferlinghetti.” The American Academy of Poets. Available online. URL: http://www.poets. org/poet.php/prmPID/367. Accessed November 23, 2006. “Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the Blue Neon Alley.” Available online. URL: http://www.neonalley.org/ferlinghetti.html. Accessed November 23, 2006. Ostergarrd, Geoffrey. Latter-Day Anarchism: The Politics of the Beat Generation. Ahmedabad, India: Harold Laski Institute of Political Science, 1964. Rigney, Francis J., and Douglas L. Smith. The Real Bohemia: Sociological and Psychological Study of the “Beats.” New York: Basic Books, 1961. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century, 1945 to the Present—Lawrence Ferlinghetti.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/ferlin.html. Accessed May 21, 2009. Silesky, Barry. Ferlinghetti, the Artist in His Time. New York: Warner Books, 1990. Skau, Michael. “Constantly Risking Absurdity”: Essays on the Writings of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1989. Smith, Larry. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet-at-Large. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Stephenson, Gregory. Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Vestere, Richard. “Ferlinghetti: Rebirth of a Beat Poet.” Identity Magazine, March 1977, pp. 42–44. Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.

Gary Ettari

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. (“America”)

T

he Jewish-American poet Irwin Allen Ginsberg, second son of Louis and Naomi Levy Ginsberg, was born on June 3, 1926. His father, a high school English teacher, was a published poet with several volumes of work and a smattering of publications in journals and newspapers. His brother, Eugene Brooks Ginsberg, had his poetry published in his lifetime but chose to drop Ginsberg from his name for most of his adulthood. Both of Ginsberg’s parents were socialists, and his mother was an active participant in the Communist Party of the United States of American (CPUSA). Her radical beliefs influenced her son’s work and political activism. Naomi Ginsberg was also plagued by mental instability and spent much of Allen Ginsberg’s life under full-time psychiatric care. Ridden with guilt over his mother’s condition and inspired by her activism, Ginsberg wrote Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), a title taken from the Jewish prayer for the dead, in which he mourns and celebrates his mother’s life, drawing upon her socialist convictions to critique American culture. Equally known as both a popular icon and a literary innovator, Ginsberg was a political activist who spoke out on a wide range of issues, from drug use to the Vietnam War to the nuclear arms race to gay rights. He remains one of the most memorable American icons of the second half of the 20th century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Allen Ginsberg attended school in nearby Paterson, subject of Wil-

liam Carlos Williams’s epic poem Paterson (published between 1946 and 1963). Ginsberg excelled in school and wrote extensively in a journal from age 11 but decided to become a poet in college. In 1943, Ginsberg enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, where he intended to study law or labor economics. After taking an introductory literature class with the renowned essayist Lionel Trilling, Ginsberg chose instead to study English. While living on campus, he befriended Lucien Carr, an attractive and street-smart young man who introduced him to a Harvard graduate, William S. Burroughs. Although Ginsberg did not know it at the time, Burroughs would become one of his closest friends and a major influence. Burroughs introduced Ginsberg to the New York underground, soon to be called the “Beat” movement, a term coined later by Jack Kerouac, and to the works of W. B. Yeats, Arthur Rimbaud, Proust, and Céline. Jack Kerouac, to whom Ginsberg introduced himself in May 1944, was an even greater influence on Ginsberg’s life and works. The two bonded instantly, and after one particularly memorable walk around the Columbia area of the city, Ginsberg said, “I suddenly realized that my own soul and his were akin.” Kerouac and Ginsberg became lifelong friends; Ginsberg shared his deepest secrets with him, even those regarding his sexual identity. From an early age, Ginsberg was aware of his homosexual

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feelings but was afraid to express them for fear of persecution. Ginsberg experienced homophobia in many forms, even at Columbia, where he was discouraged from writing a novel that contained a homosexual relationship. Kerouac’s tolerance proved vital to Ginsberg’s eventual acceptance of his own identity. Through Kerouac, Ginsberg met Neal Cassady, the ruggedly handsome “holy conman” from Denver with whom Ginsberg would experience intellectual stimulation, sexual attraction, and poetic inspiration. Ginsberg immortalized Cassady in his works, calling him the “secret hero of these poems.” Though Ginsberg maintained good grades at Columbia, he was often subject to disciplinary action, especially as a result of his association with JACK K EROUAC, who was notorious on campus for being involved with suspicious characters. In spring 1945, a cleaning woman on campus fi led a complaint against Ginsberg for writing obscene messages on his dorm room window in protest of her failure to wash them. To make matters worse, when the dean of the university showed up in Ginsberg’s room, he saw that Kerouac had been staying there illegally. Ginsberg was suspended until he provided proof that he was receiving psychiatric care. Ginsberg was reenrolled by September 1946, after his mother’s former psychiatrist pronounced him “psychologically pretty much as sound as they come.” He fi nally completed his degree in 1948. In the summer of that year, as Ginsberg lay in his bed reading the poetry of William Blake, he claims that he heard the voice of Blake himself reciting several of his poems aloud. This vision is mentioned frequently in Ginsberg’s poetry, as it instilled in him the notion of the poet as purveyor of universal and timeless truths. The voice of Blake is also present in much of Ginsberg’s work, as Blake’s writing style was a major influence on Ginsberg’s. After his visitation by Blake, and in the wake of his mother’s lobotomy a year earlier, Ginsberg experienced great difficulty with his writing and his personal life. In February 1949, after multiple refusals, Ginsberg fi nally consented to let the poet and shady Times Square personality Herbert Huncke move into his apartment. Huncke began

storing stolen property at the apartment; at the end of April, Huncke and Ginsberg were arrested. With the help of his former professors, Ginsberg avoided jail time and was sent instead for an eight-month stay at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. There he met Carl Solomon, the mentally unstable genius to whom Ginsberg would dedicate “Howl.” One month after his release from the mental hospital in February 1950, Ginsberg attended a public reading by the modernist poet William Carlos Williams at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Ginsberg was eager to meet the renowned poet from his home state, but since he was intimidated the night of the reading, he mailed Williams a formal letter of introduction with a packet of poems instead. Ginsberg was impressed by Williams’s attempts to create poetry out of American talk rhythms rather than conventional meter; however, Ginsberg himself was still attempting to write traditional rhymed and metered poetry. While Williams did not praise the poetry, he also did not turn Ginsberg away, encouraging him to send him more work. That spring Ginsberg fi rst began to feel part of a writing community. He had recently met and befriended the poet Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac were both writing extensively, often relying on Ginsberg to help them publish their works. Ginsberg was still looking for his own voice and was getting closer each day in his journal entries. He enjoyed moderate success when “Song: Fie My Fum,” a collaborative poem written with Kerouac, was published in the eccentric journal Neurotica. In 1949, Kerouac created the term Beat generation, when referring to the group’s weariness of pressure to conform to societal standards. Although he initially used Beat to mean tired, he later extended his defi nition to include beatific, or blessed, referring to the notion that the downtrodden were the ones who were truly destined for glory. While the Beats were still gaining recognition, it was during this time that their community of interdependent writers began to solidify. Unfortunately, the “weariness” of his friends often prompted them to engage in self-destructive

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behavior, and after witnessing a high number of his acquaintances die by age 25, Ginsberg needed to spend some time away. He traveled extensively through the United States and Mexico and then made the abrupt decision to move to San Francisco. In the thriving arts scene of the beginnings of the San Francisco poetry renaissance, Ginsberg would again have a writing community, an association that always proved to be most helpful for his writing. Furthermore, the small size and bohemian climate of the city gave Ginsberg a feeling of acceptance that he lacked in New York. He immediately integrated into the scene, hobnobbing with the likes of Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen. He was also introduced to Peter Orlovsky, the young poet with whom he fell instantly in love. In July 1955, Ginsberg enrolled in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. More notably, in the fall of that year, after hearing that his friend Carl Solomon had been institutionalized once again, Ginsberg began writing “Howl,” the poem that ignited his career and made the “Beat generation” known. After a celebrated public reading in October 1955, the poem was published by the San Francisco poet L AWRENCE FERLINGHETTI. His publishing company City Lights printed Howl and Other Poems, a collection including “America,” “Sunflower Sutra,” and “A Supermarket in California.” William Carlos Williams wrote the introduction, which ended with the infamous directive “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.” While the book received much critical acclaim after its 1956 publication, the year was darkened by the death of Naomi Ginsberg of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 9. She died at Greystone, a mental institution. At her funeral not enough men had assembled to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning. Feeling as though this left her death open-ended, Ginsberg began writing “Kaddish,” a poem he did not complete until 1960. After “Howl” was published, Ginsberg traveled in Morocco and Europe with Peter Orlovsky for almost two years. In summer 1957, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights bookstore clerk Shig

Murao were tried for publishing and selling (Ginsberg’s) obscene material, defended by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union. On October 3, Judge Horn ruled that Howl had redeeming social value, but at that point, with all the press coverage of the trial and discussion of the groundbreaking poems within literary circles, there was little that anyone could have done to prevent the book’s success. In July 1958, Ginsberg returned to New York amid wild publicity about the “Beat generation.” In Ginsberg’s absence, Jack Kerouac had unwillingly been titled “King of the Beats,” and the pressure and constant media attention had driven him into depression and alcoholism. Ginsberg, though, thrived on the notoriety. One November night, after his friend Zev Putterman read aloud from the Kaddish in a Jewish prayer book, Ginsberg returned home to resume work on the poem, completing a draft in one amphetamine-induced 40-hour sitting. After polishing “Kaddish” in September 1960, Ginsberg compiled Kaddish and Other Poems, which would again be released by City Lights. He also appeared in a fi lm called Tip My Daisy, titled after a line from the collaboration between Ginsberg and Kerouac, and distributed sound recordings of his poetry. A friend from Corinth Press expressed interest in publishing Empty Mirror, a manuscript of poems that Ginsberg had completed in 1952 but for which he had been unable to fi nd a publisher. Both Kaddish and Empty Mirror were published in 1961, and a new collection, Reality Sandwiches, followed in 1963. Ginsberg’s prodigious writings in the early 1960s fi nally earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963–64. The early 1960s also signaled a period of increased drug experimentation for Ginsberg. Shortly after returning from his trip abroad, Ginsberg participated in a Stanford University study of the effects of LSD. In winter 1960, he tried “magic mushrooms” for the fi rst time under the watch of the Harvard psychiatrist Timothy Leary, who later wrote of that evening, “We started planning the psychedelic revolution.” Already an outspoken proponent of marijuana legalization, Ginsberg preached the gospel of psychedelic drugs to other

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artists, meanwhile experimenting with the effects of drugs on his writing. While much of his druginfluenced poetry did not stand up to his best work, some pieces, such as the associative “Television Was a Baby Crawling toward That Deathchamber,” demonstrated his ability to connect subconscious thoughts to create something that resembled Burroughs’s “cut-up” (collage) method of pasting together unrelated lines of writing. In time, though, many of his friends became addicts; after traveling to Israel and India in 1962, Ginsberg decided to write from his own consciousness rather than attempting to reach an altered state of mystical consciousness with drugs. He documented this shift in “The Change.” Although he remained a spokesperson for drug legalization, he redirected his own energy into Eastern practices of meditation and spiritual chants, or mantras, in his attempts at enlightenment. Also inspired by the peaceful spirituality of Indian culture, Ginsberg became more involved in political activism, particularly in the antiwar movement. He was instrumental in the advancement of “flower power,” which insisted on gentle and peaceful protesting, and served on the planning committee of the hippie festival known as “the Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In” in 1967. While his activism did not leave much time for writing, in 1968 he published Planet News, a volume of poems heavily informed by his political experiences. While traveling throughout the United States and reading his poetry, Ginsberg developed a new technique of “auto poesy,” in which he dictated spontaneous poetry into a tape recorder and later transcribed it. In The Fall of America: Poems of these States, 1965–1971, published in 1973, Ginsberg describes his travels and what he observed to be spiritual deterioration along the way. The Fall of America, which included the powerful antiwar poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” earned Ginsberg a National Book Award in 1974. Although Jack Kerouac had instructed Ginsberg in some of the basics of Buddhism in the 1950s, it was not until the early 1970s that Ginsberg began to pursue it seriously. He studied under the Tibetan

lama Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, who founded the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He officially converted in 1972 and, together with his fellow Buddhist poet Anne Waldman, opened the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, an arts program in the tradition of Tibetan pedagogy. In 1978, he published a collection of poems, many of which were based on his Buddhist experiences, entitled Mind Breaths, referring to the Samatha style of meditation, in which participants pay special attention to breathing in order to heighten awareness. After accompanying Bob Dylan as a performer on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Ginsberg spent the end of 1975 and fi rst few months of 1976 with his father, who was suffering from diseases of the lung and pancreas. Louis Ginsberg passed away on July 8, 1976, and “Don’t Grow Old,” Ginsberg’s moving recounting of his death, was included in Mind Breaths. The collection as a whole was something of a departure from his more political work, and while 1982’s Plutonian Ode addresses issues of nuclear warfare, his work at this point had withdrawn from its prophetic pedestal and turned to more introspective, lyrical pieces. The title poem of White Shroud: Poems 1980–1985, for instance, contains another nostalgic memory of his parents, in which Ginsberg relates a dream about his mother living as a bag lady in New York. Ginsberg’s last poems, many of which were written during the brief period between his diagnosis of liver cancer and his death, are collected in Death and Fame: Poems, 1993–1997. Ginsberg continued to tour the country reading his work late into his life and, after struggling with complications of hepatitis and cancer, died on April 5, 1997. While Ginsberg’s poetry is often hailed as the voice of a generation, to relegate his work to just one generation, or even to just one voice, does not take into account the prodigious career of one of the 20th century’s most influential poets. Ginsberg’s experimentation in his life and in his writing not only led to the creation of a remarkable body of work, but also, as Helen Vendler writes, was “responsible for loosening the breath of American

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poetry.” Teeming with rage, humor, insight, and sincerity, the work of Ginsberg not only serves as the voice of his generation but also paves the way for future generations to have voices of their own.

“On Burroughs’ Work” (1954) “On Burroughs’ Work,” published in his fourth collection of poetry, Reality Sandwiches, pays homage to the writer William S. Burroughs, a fellow proponent of the American Beat movement. The fi rst two lines of the poem, “The method must be purest meat / and no symbolic dressing,” refer to the Beats’ insistence that literature relate only a pure and honest record of human life. As with Ginsberg, Burroughs’s brutal honesty (often to the point of relating vivid sexual and drug-related details) led him to face censorship in his writing career. In the third stanza of the poem, Ginsberg alludes to Burroughs’s seminal and experimental work, Naked Lunch. The novel graphically recounts a drug addict’s travels through both physical space and hallucinated worlds, which Ginsberg refers to as “Prisons and visions presented / with rare descriptions / corresponding exactly to those / of Alcatraz and Rose.” The poem also alludes indirectly to Jack Kerouac, another major Beat writer, who suggested the title Naked Lunch for Burroughs’s novel. Among other works, Kerouac wrote On the Road, one of the most important books of the Beat generation. In the novel, Kerouac writes about his cross-country travels in verbose, page-long paragraphs using a version of the stream-of-consciousness style, in which a character’s thoughts are presented with little regard to grammatical constraints. This unrestrained depiction of consciousness exemplified the writing style of Kerouac, a close friend to Ginsberg, and his artistic influence is seen more clearly in Ginsberg’s later poems. In the last stanza, Ginsberg uses the phrase reality sandwiches, which he adopted as the title of the collection. When asked about the title of his own book, Burroughs described a naked lunch as “a fro-

zen moment in time when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” For Ginsberg, this “frozen moment” translates into his trademark spontaneous poetry, in which he composed poems over the course of a few minutes that documented a specific moment in time. He writes that “allegories are so much lettuce,” demonstrating his skepticism of traditional works of literature that use one story to tell another, often moralistic, tale. His last line, “Don’t hide the madness,” is a call to arms to other Beat writers to follow in the tradition of Burroughs’s work and portray the depths of their souls without regard to social norms or literary tradition.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Modernist poetry had roots in imagism, an artistic movement based on the precision and clarity of figurative language. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” demonstrates the influence of imagism, as does William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” What makes Ginsberg’s poem, although it certainly exercises economy of language, different from those modernist standards? 2. Discuss the problems inherent in the phrase actual visions. How does the fact that Ginsberg and Burroughs treat visions as reality complicate their philosophy?

“A Supermarket in California” (1955) “A Supermarket in California” appears in Ginsberg’s renowned 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. Although it is often considered a lesser poem in the collection because of its playful tone, the speaker in “A Supermarket in California” grapples with issues of tremendous importance. As does the landscape in “Howl,” the supermarket serves as a composite of the images of American life in the 1950s. Written while Ginsberg was living in a cottage near the Berkeley campus, the poem reflects the style of the San Francisco Beat poets and also situates itself in the larger tradition of American poetry. In the fi rst line Ginsberg addresses his major influence, Walt

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Whitman, simultaneously invoking him as a muse and looking ironically at his unfulfi lled prophecy for America. He also writes in long-lined free verse, a technique Whitman pioneered. At the start of the poem, Ginsberg walks down the moonlit sidewalk to a sprawling grocery store, where he has wandered in a tired, ill-at-ease state while “shopping for images.” Remarking on the families in the store, he encounters Whitman perusing the meats and the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca shopping for produce. This poem is often considered to contain references to Ginsberg’s homosexuality, and with a deliberate play on derogatory slang, he places the gay writers Whitman and Garcia Lorca among the “fruits” in the market. Ginsberg then trails Whitman through the store, following in his footsteps both literally and literarily. In the last stanza, Ginsberg becomes the inquirer. Significantly, he asks, “Where are we going, Walt Whitman?” In his poetry nearly 100 years earlier, Whitman spoke of America as a vast frontier ripe for exploration. Ginsberg lived in an era characterized by the rise of suburbia, technology, and large chain stores. Whitman’s landscape was one of “green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn”; Ginsberg’s is one of “blue automobiles in driveways.” Ginsberg expresses his resistance to consumer culture and desire to remain the “poet outlaw,” as he and Whitman wander through the store tasting and possessing “and never passing the cashier.” Ginsberg considers the role of the poet as one outside the mainstream world of buyers. At the end of the last stanza, Ginsberg invokes a different poetic tradition, that of a deceased poet leading a living one through the underworld. As Dante took Virgil as his guide in The Divine Comedy, so does Ginsberg follow Whitman to Lethe, one of the rivers that flowed through the ancient Greek mythological underworld Hades. Ginsberg’s use of Lethe, which translates literally as “forgetfulness,” suggests that with Whitman’s death, his vision of “the lost America of love,” is also forgotten. Ginsberg is left alone to ask his “dear father,

graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,” what America do we have now?

For Discussion or Writing 1. In his poem “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman talks about laborers working in the fields to grow crops and raise cattle. How is the world that Whitman describes, in which the human “body electric” is immediately present in the production of goods, different from the “neon fruit supermarket,” where artificial lighting and mass-produced foods obscure the labor that went into producing those goods? What is the significance of living in a society where production is divorced from the things being produced, the products? 2. Discuss the significance of the parenthetical comment in the last stanza. How does this break in the speaker’s fantasy affect the rest of the poem? Why might Ginsberg “feel absurd”?

“Sunflower Sutra” (1955) “Sunflower Sutra” appeared in Howl and Other Poems (1956); critics often link it thematically to the title piece because of their shared focus on the corruption of human life. Composed in only 20 minutes, “Sunflower Sutra” embodies the Beat ideal, advanced by Jack Kerouac, of spontaneous flow of perception in poetry. Like “A Supermarket in California,” the poem is set in an unconventional space for inspiration: a rundown and grimy train yard near the docks on the river. Equally out of place is the sunflower that Jack Kerouac spots, growing from the littered ground with “a dead fly in its ear.” The flower itself is an allusion to William Blake’s 18th-century poem “Ah! Sun-flower” but more importantly relates to Ginsberg’s own experience: “it was my fi rst sunflower, memories of Blake— / my visions—Harlem.” In 1948 in his East Harlem apartment, Ginsberg had an apparition that profoundly affected him for the rest of his life. After reading Blake poems in bed,

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Ginsberg heard the voice of Blake reciting several poems to him, among them “Ah! Sun-flower.” Ginsberg’s vision forced him to question his place as a poet in the universe, and he concluded that poetry could transcend space and time to pass on universal truths. Appropriately, Ginsberg deemed this poem a sutra, referring to Buddhist scripture derived from the oral teachings of the Buddha. As does ancient wisdom literature, this poem has the power to bestow its message to readers for eternity. And Ginsberg in the poem takes on the role of priest, as he grabs the sunflower and stands, to “deliver my sermon to my soul, and Kerouac’s soul, and anyone who’ll listen.” Furthermore, Ginsberg moves freely though time and space, responding directly to an encounter with Blake, long dead. This poem deals with the victimization of natural beauty at the hands of humankind. The sunflower represents the pristine earth, whereas the locomotive represents the destructive industrial power that leaves us all with a “skin of grime.” In the wake of World War II, Ginsberg had seen what the results of technological advances could be, particularly the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bomb. The sunflower is not just nature but also contemporary culture, which is made utterly gray and dead by “that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern.” Still, the message of “Sunflower Sutra” is not hopeless. In the last stanza, Ginsberg reminds us, “We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread bleak dusty imageless / locomotive, we’re all golden sunflowers inside.” As Blake and Ginsberg celebrate the lives of sunflowers, so should we celebrate our own lives.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The critic Richard Eberhart called this work “a lyric poem marked by pathos.” Pathos refers to a quality in art that arouses emotion. Do you agree with Eberhart’s statement? If so, where is your sympathy directed? If not, why does Ginsberg fail to effect emotion? What aspects of

this poem could be changed to invoke genuine sentiment? 2. Read William Blake’s poem “Ah! Sun-flower.” Discuss how Blake’s “weary of time” sunflower compares to Ginsberg’s, which seems to be already dead. Discuss how each of the poems deals with the passage of time, particularly as it applies to moving closer to death.

“America” (1956) “America,” as its second line suggests, was composed on January 17, 1956, and appeared fi rst in Howl and Other Poems (1956) and again in the Black Mountain Review during Ginsberg’s stint as coeditor. Its spontaneous composition is reflected in the fact that the poem has no consistent structure, switching among multiple tones and styles throughout. Ginsberg’s stream-of-consciousness technique creates a poem that jumps quickly between subjects, from personal to political, holy to vulgar, social to cultural, showing the interconnectedness of those many facets of American life. The poem is arranged as a series of crests and falls; each section gains momentum, climaxes, and then backs off and starts over again. To understand “America” best, it is important to consider the American political and social climate at the time of its composition. By 1956, the United States had participated in both world wars and was currently involved in an arms race with the Soviet Union, one in which both sides stockpiled nuclear arms. Historians commonly refer to this protracted period of military engagement and espionage as the cold war, which lasted from about 1947 to the period leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. Ginsberg was profoundly affected by America’s decision to bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, which is perhaps what he refers to in the line “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” Furthermore, the United States government in the 1950s had instituted a campaign for nationalism and patriotism, a campaign that

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focused on demonizing differing viewpoints, particularly communism. In a democratic nation allegedly founded on freedom of choice, there was very little tolerance for dissent. Ginsberg plays on the patriotic ramblings of the 1950s and creates his own diatribe, one that turns the unfettered praise of America on its head. Instead of referring to America as an abstract concept like the “land of the free,” Ginsberg boldly addresses the nation directly from the very fi rst line: “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” In fact, the poem avoids abstractions, opting instead for concrete details plucked from Ginsberg’s personal experience, right down to the amount of money he has in his wallet (“two dollars and twentyseven cents”). The poem reflects the influence of his parents. Both Russian Jewish immigrants, Ginsberg’s parents were sympathetic to socialist causes, his mother even participating actively in the Communist Party USA. Naomi Ginsberg took both of her young sons with her to Communist Party meetings, as Ginsberg documents in the third stanza. Furthermore, while Ginsberg was a self-described anarchist at the time of this poem’s composition, he clearly demonstrates leanings toward socialism, from his sentimental feelings toward the once-powerful International Workers of the World (or “Wobblies,” as he calls them in the fi rst stanza), to his plea to free Tom Mooney, a deceased American labor leader. Although Ginsberg expresses revolutionary sentiments, he clearly feels a close connection to America and acknowledges his inability to divorce himself from the nation. In the fi rst stanza, he writes, “I refuse to give up my obsession,” and he proves it in the rest of the poem. Although Ginsberg confesses that he smokes marijuana “every chance I get,” and that he was once a communist and feels no regrets about it, he still claims that he aspires to be president. At the poem’s close, he admits that while he opposes war and industrial technology, he still intends to “get right down to the job,” and put his “queer shoulder to the wheel.” But, unfortunately, America will never give back what he puts

in; he merely gives of himself until there is nothing left to give. Also noteworthy is the way that “America” fits within Ginsberg’s larger body of work. Ginsberg began composing the poem shortly after his landmark fi rst public reading of “Howl” in October 1955. This particularly well-received reading not only admitted him to the San Francisco poetry renaissance scene but also gave him the confidence to confess more about himself openly. As in “Howl” and “Sunflower Sutra,” Ginsberg adopts the voice of a prophet, proclaiming the power of poetry to convey human experience. Still, though, he has not forgotten his influences; he still uses Whitman’s long line, and his question “America when will you be angelic?” noticeably echoes the speaker in Ginsberg’s 1955 poem “A Supermarket in California” who asks the grocery boys, “Are you my Angel?” Furthermore, Ginsberg expresses disdain for technology, as seen in his 1955 poem “Sunflower Sutra,” in which the symbol of the locomotive portrays industry’s capacity to corrupt natural beauty. In the fi rst stanza of “America,” Ginsberg writes, “Your machinery is too much for me.” Indeed, the depravity of America’s very material culture is a major theme in this poem. When discussing “them bad Russians” toward the end of the poem, Ginsberg writes, “Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.” Here he predicts not just a foreboding of the spread of American industry into other parts of the world but also the increasing conception among Americans that all other countries are obsessed with the United States and want to participate in American culture (“Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest.”) At the poem’s close, Ginsberg attacks American xenophobia. Two years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case that desegregated schools, Ginsberg writes a poem that is obviously aware of the pressure to eliminate racism in the United States. His awareness of racial politics is perhaps most evident at the top of the third stanza, where he writes, “America I am the Scottsboro boys,” thus allying himself with

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the group of African-American teens wrongfully accused of rape in the 1930s. Later in the stanza, he pokes fun at the racist domestic policies of America, writing, “Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.” And yet, as he closes the poem, Ginsberg admits that all of his information is merely perceived from “looking in the television set.” The irony of issues like racism is that they are so fi rmly rooted in the perpetuation of harmful images as opposed to lived experience. For Ginsberg one of the most perplexing aspects of the obscenity trial of “Howl” was that the courts were so concerned with mere images, representations of actualities, rather than the monstrosities he attempted to illustrate. Still, as a poet, Ginsberg too, is inextricably tied up with images. By presenting the reader with a poem that jumps illogically from image to image, Ginsberg hopes to represent the irrationality and confusion of America itself.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the ways that gendered pronouns operate in this poem. In particular, look at the end of the last stanza, where Russia is personified as female, while America is referred to as “Him.” Slavic people all over the world once referred to Russia as a mother, while Nazi propaganda referred to Germany as the “Fatherland.” What is the significance of being a male versus a female nation? Why does Ginsberg use these classifications in “America”? 2. In their critiques of Howl and Other Poems, the critics Lucien Carr and Richard Eberhart remark on the humor of “America,” as compared to the anger in “Howl.” Read both poems, attempting to fi nd humor in each. Why is “Howl” considered an angry poem while “America” is not? Can both be read as funny? As outraged? 3. In the last stanza, the speaker’s voice changes, shifting into a rudimentary, grammatically incorrect English. Why does Ginsberg choose this voice, and how does it reflect upon the subject matter he uses it to discuss?

“Howl” (1956) “Howl,” the title piece from Ginsberg’s breakthrough collection, was completed in 1956 and circulated in pamphlet form throughout the San Francisco poetry renaissance scene before being formally published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights in 1956. Howl and Other Poems jumpstarted Ginsberg’s career, receiving both critical acclaim and copious media attention due to the obscenity trial resulting from its publication. Considered one of the principal works of the Beat generation, “Howl” is widely taught in literature classes today and is frequently imitated by and cited as an influence to poets all over the world. When asked in 1982 how he had mentally and creatively equipped himself to write “Howl,” Ginsberg responded: You have to be inspired to write something like that. . . . You have to have the right historical information, the right physical combination, the right mental formation, the right courage, the right sense of prophecy, and the right information.

The inspiration for Ginsberg to begin “Howl” was from his friend Carl Solomon, to whom the poem is dedicated. Solomon and Ginsberg met in 1949 at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute, where Ginsberg was hospitalized in lieu of serving jail time for his involvement in a property theft ring. Solomon, whom Ginsberg immediately recognized as a genius, had spent time in mental institutions before and would continue to do so until the end of his life. One such instance would inspire “Howl”: After Ginsberg heard that Solomon had been committed at the Pilgrim State Hospital, which happened to be the same facility treating Ginsberg’s mother, he became fully convinced that the greatest thinkers he knew had been “destroyed by madness.” The structure of “Howl,” which Richard Eberhart called “Biblical in its repetitive grammatical build-up,” is reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s long lines, which themselves were derived from the King

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James Bible. The fi rst and third sections of the poem also employ Whitman’s characteristic listing, with a base word or phrase to unite the lines as a section. In one last nod to Whitman, Ginsberg writes from an intimately personally perspective, opening with fi rst-person singular pronouns (“I saw the best minds of my generation”), not unlike Whitman’s opening of “Song of Myself” (“I celebrate myself, and sing myself”). Unlike Whitman, though, Ginsberg uses these pronouns only once. Although he does not refer to himself in the fi rst person for the rest of the fi rst section, he is still present in each line. Ginsberg does not write as an outsider looking in; he is intimately engaged in the lives and events of the poem. In the fi rst section of “Howl,” Ginsberg compiles a list of all the minds and spirits that have been ravaged by a mysterious force of “madness,” most of them from his personal experience. His litany refers to acquaintances from all parts of his life, from Carl Solomon to his close friend and fellow Beat figure Neal Cassady, even including himself. While the catalog in the fi rst section refers only to people connected to Ginsberg, the amassing of such a sizable group makes the “angelheaded hipsters” seem to be an entire generation, a cohort of young people searching for connection in a world that rejects them. This sense of alienation characterized the Beat generation, a group of writers and friends who wrote confessional, experimental poetry and prose, often on the happenings of their counterculture lifestyles. However, Ginsberg does not exclusively refer to the Beats; indeed, he pokes fun at them in “Howl,” calling them scribblers of “lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.” Ginsberg’s howl goes out to all disenchanted Eisenhower era Americans, and the revelation of the intimate details of his life opens up the possibility for readers to recognize similar qualities in themselves and to accept their own nontraditional thoughts and feelings. Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s technique of spontaneous composition, Ginsberg wrote the fi rst section of “Howl” in one sitting, typing his thoughts straight into a typewriter. Just after completing the

fi rst section, he began composing the third. It was not until later that he composed the second section, which forms the bridge between the two and locates the source of the “madness.” Unlike for the fi rst and third sections, which required only minor revisions, Ginsberg wrote more than 20 drafts of the second section. This section identifies the source of society’s disdain for the characters in section 1 as Moloch, the Canaanite fi re god to whom parents would sacrifice their children. Ginsberg’s drug use proved helpful in the composition of the Moloch section of “Howl,” as the central image derives from a vision that he experienced while under the influence of peyote, a psychedelic drug. While walking through the streets of San Francisco, Ginsberg encountered the looming façade of the Francis Drake Hotel and saw in it a terrifying monster: the face of Moloch. Furthermore, an urban landmark seemed appropriate for the villain of “Howl,” in which Ginsberg hoped to address the horrors of civilization. Indeed, as he describes Moloch he begins to sound more like a cityscape than a god. Although based on a hallucination, Ginsberg’s impetus for using Moloch is startlingly clear: After watching so many fellow young people go off to war and die, or lose themselves to the drugs and soullessness of American cities, it truly did seem that children were being fed into a fi re. The third and fi nal section of “Howl” addresses one of these children directly. With each line, Ginsberg comforts his friend Carl Solomon, telling him that he is with him in Rockland (another New York psychiatric hospital where Solomon had spent time). Following each statement of solidarity, Ginsberg provides a snapshot of Solomon’s institutionalized life, documenting his feeble but ingenious attempts to stay alive in the world described in the fi rst and second sections. In the last lines of the poem, Ginsberg places Solomon and himself together for his vision of redemption: “where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’/ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs / the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse.” Despite the devastating landscape around him, Ginsberg still envisions a time when

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bombs will not kill people, hospitals will not need to incarcerate geniuses, and people will not build make-believe divisions between them. Of the few revisions made on the third section, one of the most important was the change from I am to I’m. This gave each line the appropriate cadence to be read aloud. Its breath-length lines allow for “the right physical combination,” one of Ginsberg’s self-defi ned requirements for poetic form. Overall, Ginsberg’s concern with sound and rhythm in “Howl” accounts a great deal for its success. Kerouac’s spontaneous style of composition heavily influenced Ginsberg’s writing of this piece, as did the influence of William Carlos Williams, American vernacular, and, in particular, elements of jazz. Ginsberg described the verses of “Howl” as “long saxophone-like chorus lines I knew Kerouac would hear the sound of.” Michael Schumacher points out in his biography of Ginsberg that sections of “Howl” almost take on the feel of musical movements, particularly the second section, which he divides in three: the fi rst part with its hot saxophonic expressions, reminiscent of the jazz lines of Charlie Parker and Lester Young; the second part, with short “squawks” or statements, not unlike those played by Miles Davis; and the third part, with a cool bluesy and lyrical feeling similar to the moody music played by John Coltrane. (Dharma Lion, 1992)

The connections between “Howl” and jazz music from around the same period help establish the poem as the anthem of a generation. Notable, too, is the role of “Howl” in the solidification of the Beat generation. Although Jack Kerouac coined the term for their group of friends as early as 1948, and John Clellon Holmes defi ned and popularized it in a 1952 New York Times article, the movement still lacked the publicity it needed for more writers to be published. While William S. Burroughs’s novel Junkie had been published under a pen name in 1953, authors like Jack Kerouac, who completed his novel On the

Road six years before it was published in 1957, were having trouble gaining a foothold in the literary world. In October 1955, with the help of the San Francisco Renaissance poets Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, Ginsberg organized a poetry reading at San Francisco’s legendary Six Gallery, where he read “Howl” in public for the fi rst time. His performance was so moving that it brought him and several audience members to tears. His reading, later hailed as “the birth trauma of the Beat Generation,” led Lawrence Ferlinghetti to publish Howl and Other Poems as part of his Pocket Poets Series. One year later, the New York Times sent the reviewer Richard Eberhart to the Bay Area to write a story about the work of the writers there, in which he named “Howl” “the most remarkable poem of the young group.” Ginsberg’s notoriety only increased in 1957, when Ferlinghetti was tried in San Francisco for “publishing and selling obscene material.” By the end of the trial, Howl and Other Poems was in its fourth printing, and the United States was totally aware of the poem itself and the group of writers defending it, but especially of Allen Ginsberg.

For Discussion or Writing 1. While “Howl” is dedicated to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg admits that the poem was an early attempt to deal with the loss of his mother to mental illness. Where is this evident? 2. Compare and contrast “Howl” with T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Waste Land.” Eliot’s poem was composed in the wake of World War I, and Ginsberg’s just after World War II. Is this difference significant? Discuss the conclusions that each poet draws and what those conclusions say about their individual worldviews. 3. The penultimate line of section 1 of “Howl” contains the Aramaic phrase eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani, meaning “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” These are the attributed last words of Jesus Christ as he died on the cross. Why does Ginsberg choose to incorporate this line, and what is the significance of its placement at the end of the fi rst section?

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“To Aunt Rose” (1958) “To Aunt Rose,” one of the two great elegies that appear in Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), laments the loss of Ginsberg’s aunt, his father’s sister. She died when Ginsberg was just 14, but her memory stayed with him throughout his life, as he writes, “I see you walking still, a ghost on Osborne Terrace.” Using a brief series of specific details, Ginsberg gives the reader an entire history of his life with this woman, from an experience in his early puberty to his visit to her in the hospital at the end of her life. Ginsberg composed “To Aunt Rose” (and many of the poems from Kaddish) while on an extended stay in Europe in 1957. Experiencing cities so rich in history, some of which, such as London, had been devastated by World War II, led Ginsberg to conclude that politics was destroying the world. He felt that as a poet he had the responsibility to take over where the leaders of the human race had fallen short. Ginsberg’s struggle with history and political affairs is evident in “To Aunt Rose” with its many historical references. Rose was politically active in her life, and her husband was involved in the Communist Party. As though to comfort the deceased woman in a world gone awry, he assures her that “the war in Spain has ended long ago.” Furthermore, Ginsberg uses Aunt Rose’s death to signify the collapse of various other structures in his life. For instance, he writes, “Hitler is dead, Hitler is in Eternity; Hitler is with / Tamburlane and Emily Bronte.” Tamburlane is the 14th-century Mongol conqueror; when he is juxtaposed with the British author Emily Bronte the reader is prompted to think of him in literary terms, as in Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century play about the historical figure. Thus, Ginsberg signifies the death not only of Adolf Hitler but also of the proponents of antiquated styles of literature. In the next stanza, Ginsberg returns to more personal issues and moves on to discuss various aspects of death in his own family. He mentions his father, “the Poet,” who visits Rose to tell her about his book being published by Liveright. Ginsberg, though, retorts, “Hitler is dead and Liver-

ight’s gone out of business,” as his father’s writing career has been laid to rest as well. Ginsberg goes on to update Aunt Rose on the other failures of the family, including Uncle Harry’s business’s folding, Claire’s decision to quit school, and his grandmother Buba’s removal to a retirement home. The elegy mourns not just the death of Aunt Rose, but the dissolution of Ginsberg’s family in various other ways as well. Despite its somber subject matter, though, “To Aunt Rose” demonstrates Ginsberg’s mastery of the elegiac form and is considered by his biographer Michael Schumacher “one of Ginsberg’s loveliest early works.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast “To Aunt Rose” with “Kaddish,” Ginsberg’s elegy for his mother. Aside from obvious structural differences, how do the poems differ in terms of the way Ginsberg portrays the two women? And how does Ginsberg portray the ways in which both women had an effect on him, particularly with regard to politics? 2. Compare “To Aunt Rose” with Dylan Thomas’s “After the Funeral (In Memory of Ann Jones),” Thomas’s poem composed for his own deceased aunt. What similarities can you fi nd? What differences?

“Ego Confession” (1974) “Ego Confession” appeared in Mind Breaths (1977), Ginsberg’s sixth collection in the City Lights Pocket Poet Series. Although the subject matter is markedly different from that of Ginsberg’s groundbreaking “Howl,” the two poems share an element of risk taking, of baring the poet’s soul, knowing that he might be subject to ridicule and criticism as a result. It is an exercise in unornamented honesty, a spontaneous composition that helped Ginsberg sort out a quandary in his own mind. The poem begins auspiciously, with the frank statement “I want to be known as the most bril-

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liant man in America.” Sometimes referred to as Ginsberg’s “Song of Myself,” the opening does call to mind Walt Whitman’s “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” Such a comparison is apt, too, because Ginsberg sought to carry on the tradition of Walt Whitman in much of his poetry. Ginsberg struggled early on in his writing career to determine the role of the poet in a society that rejected him. In this sense, Ginsberg also unites himself with poetic tradition. In “Ego Confession,” he writes, “I want to be the spectacle of Poesy triumphant over trickery of the world,” perhaps referencing the 16thcentury essay “The Defense of Poesy” by Sir Philip Sidney. This work, a standard in literature classes, defends poetry against those who suggest that it leads society to immorality and is made up of lies. Ginsberg certainly faced similar critiques decades later in his career, in which he had to argue the literary value of his work to censors displeased with his open discussion of his sexuality and drug use. “Ego Confession” takes on another layer of meaning when examined within the context of Ginsberg’s spiritual life. By 1974, Ginsberg was a devout Buddhist, practicing a faith that focuses on deconstructing the human ego, the individual self. At fi rst, “Ego Confession” seems to contradict that notion. Yet it reveals socially unacceptable feelings in such a public way that the speaker truly appears as a humble voice. A second irony is that while many people share Ginsberg’s desire to be memorable and well known, Ginsberg himself experienced a great deal of success during his lifetime, seeing much of his work published, praised, and even taught in schools. To see a famous man confessing his desire to be famous renders the entire concept frivolous and leaves author and reader alike feeling a little embarrassed.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the line “—who had no subject but himself in many disguises.” Apply this as a framework for reading “Howl” or “Kaddish,” two of Ginsberg’s poems that were written specifically for or about someone else. Does his classification of himself ring true in one of those contexts?

2. In his review of Mind Breaths, the New York Times writer Hayden Carruth described “Ego Confession” as being “infused with passionate tenderness.” Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON GINSBERG AND HIS WORK 1. The last line of “On Burroughs’ Work” instructs the reader not to “hide the madness.” One year later, in the famous opening line of “Howl,” Ginsberg would write, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Does Ginsberg refer to two different “madnesses,” one favorable and one destructive, or are they the same condition responded to differently? Mental illness played a huge role in Ginsberg’s life, from childhood, when his mother was frequently institutionalized and fi nally lobotomized, to old age, with his longtime companion Peter Orlovsky, who suffered from substance abuse and recurrent mental breakdowns. Discuss the portrayal of “madness” in Ginsberg’s work, looking both at how mentally ill people are portrayed and how he deals with his own psychological condition. 2. During the course of his lifetime, Allen Ginsberg experienced great literary success. Now, after his death, he is even more widely studied as part of a canon of American literature. Though much of his philosophy revolved around being a member of a counterculture, his work has garnered mainstream acceptance, leading the book reviewer Rachel Aviv to call him “the country’s most irresistible antihero.” Is Ginsberg’s recognition contrary to what he and the rest of the Beats represented? Has Ginsberg’s acceptance lessened the impact of his work? 3. Though Ginsberg converted to Buddhism as an adult, his Jewish background still suffuses his life’s work. Locate references to Judaism in Ginsberg’s poetry. How does Ginsberg’s Jewish identity affect the way he writes about religion, spirituality, and cultural identity in general?

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4. The height of Ginsberg’s career coincides with the American Civil Rights Movement. Although Ginsberg was more closely associated with the antiwar movement, his political activism unquestionably intersected with antiracist movements of the same period. Does Ginsberg speak out against racism in the same way that he does against other oppressive forces in America? Locate passages in “Howl,” “America,” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra” that might be interpreted as antiracist. 5. While Ginsberg’s open homosexuality was radical at the time, does he exhibit progressive attitudes about other aspects of sexuality? Look at the way gender is represented in his work, particularly how he discusses women. In poems like “This Form of Life Needs Sex,” Ginsberg employs sexist language to express his frustration about the social disapproval of homosexuality. What are some of the problems with using the very language he tries to critique? WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Aviv, Rachel. “Save the Beatniks!” Poetry Foundation. Available online. URL: http://www.poetry foundation.org/dispatches/dispatches.reading. html?id=178113. Accessed July 1, 2006. Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Campbell, James. This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Caveney, Graham. Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947–1980. New York: HarperPerennial, 1984. ———. Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958– 1996. Edited by David Carter. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Holmes, Clellon. “This Is the Beat Generation.” New York Times, 16 November 1952, p. SM10. Hyde, Lewis. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Kraus, Michelle P. Allen Ginsberg: An Annotated Bibliography, 1969–1977. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980. Lardas, John. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Merrill, Thomas F. Allen Ginsberg. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Morgan, Bill. The Response to Allen Ginsberg, 1926– 1994: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. ———. The Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941–1994: A Descriptive Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Portuges, Paul Cornel. The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ross-Erikson, 1978. Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Reed, Brian. The Allen Ginsberg Trust. Available online. URL: http://www.allenginsberg.org. Accessed July 2, 2006. Sanders, Ed. The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000. Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Sullivan, James. “Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997).” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ ginsberg/ginsberg.htm. Accessed June 30, 2006. Tytell, John. Naked Angels: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. New York: Grove Press, 1976. Whitman, Walt. Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996.

Caitlin Shanley

Alex Haley (1921–1992) If you tell a people that they have no history, that they have nothing of which to be proud, that they are innately inferior, then they will eventually come to believe it. (Interview with Jeffrey Eliot, Negro History Bulletin 41, no. 1 [January/February 1978]: 785)

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biographer, journalist, and celebrated novelist, Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, the oldest son of Simon Alexander Haley, a college professor, and Bertha George Palmer, an elementary school teacher. Soon after their son’s birth, when both parents were in graduate school—his mother at Ithaca Conservatory of Music and his father at Cornell University—Simon and Bertha sent their infant son to Henning, Tennessee, where he was raised largely by his grandmother and aunts. Haley heard about family history from his grandmother, Cynthia Palmer, who told Alex the family lore, tracing their lineage to a slave taken to America from Africa, named Kintay. Alex whiled away the hours listening to tales on his grandmother’s porch, tales that would ultimately inspire him to write his highly influential masterwork Roots. Kintay refused to accept his christened slave name of Toby and frequently tried to escape from his plantation. This story fascinated Haley because of Kintay’s pride and determination to retain his African identity. With it in mind, Haley wrote Roots, a fictional saga based on research and the tales he heard as a child, an endeavor fueled by Haley’s desire to tell his family’s story, which he believed as representative of the African-American experience. In addition to this novel, which most Americans knew through a television series, Haley, after extensive interviews, coauthored The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which records the

life of a key figure in the Civil Rights movement as told from Malcom X’s perspective. (For more information on this work, see the entry on M ALCOLM X.) Although Haley eventually became an author known to millions, he was not an outstanding student. After graduating from high school and attending Alcorn A&M in Mississippi, Haley transferred to Elizabeth City State Teachers College in North Carolina, where he studied from 1937 to 1939. Haley joined the U.S. Coast Guard during World War II and began writing in his spare time to relieve boredom on long sea voyages. He wrote love letters for his fellow sailors, which they sent to their girlfriends and wives, and began composing adventure stories. Haley also published several magazine articles during this period, eventually working as a Coast Guard journalist. After an illustrious 20-year military career in the Coast Guard, during which he ascended from mess boy to chief journalist, Haley retired in 1959 at the age of 37. He then decided to embark upon a second career as a writer. After divorcing his fi rst wife and having his pension appropriated to pay for child support, Haley moved to a basement apartment in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, barely subsisting on what little he managed to save or borrow until he could establish himself as a writer. Eventually, Haley’s perseverance was rewarded: Haley’s articles started appearing in popular magazines, including Reader’s Digest. These publications led

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to a Playboy magazine assignment: an interview with the famed jazz musician Miles Davis in 1962. The Playboy assignments led Haley to many other candid and insightful interviews with public figures such as Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, Jr., Quincy Jones, Johnny Carson, and the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. In 1963, Playboy asked Haley to write an article on Malcolm X, the controversial AfricanAmerican nationalist. During the interview with Malcolm X, then one of the followers of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X asked Haley to help him tell his life story. As a representative for Elijah Muhammad and as a gifted orator with a busy schedule of speaking engagements, Malcolm X delegated the task of recording his life to Haley. The result of that collaboration, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, was published in 1965 and sold 6 million copies. Haley wrote the text from notes he made during informal conversations, extended interviews, dictations, and diary entries. Although Malcolm X did not live to see the book published, he read and authorized the semiautobiography before his premature death in February 1965, when he was assassinated by unknown assailants while lecturing at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. The book offered an unexpected portrait of a man many Americans conceived of as a militant racist. The Autobiography of Malcolm X portrays Malcolm X as both a humane and visionary thinker with great insights into the black experience, a oncemilitant man (Malcolm X described himself as “the angriest black man in America”) who, after his conversion to Islam, rejected separatist views and embraced what he referred to as a “Human Society.” Haley’s rendering of Malcolm X’s life remains an influential, insightful look at one of the most important and charismatic black leaders during the turbulent fight for civil rights in the 1960s, a leader who, after angrily fighting for the black cause, focused on hope for a peaceful future. Like the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Haley’s work is an important historical document and a humanistic work of literature now considered part of the American literary canon.

A few weeks after finishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley began researching his family’s genealogy, which led him to write his epic-length and Pulitzer Prize–winning (1977) novel Roots (1976). The tales that Haley heard as a young boy in the 1920s and 1930s inspired him in 1964 to research his maternal ancestry. After digging through national and state archives, Haley approached Doubleday with an idea for a novel, which he planned to entitle Before This Anger, a record of his family’s history and eventual triumph over slavery. Securing an advance, Haley conducted further research in the United States. This research project widened dramatically in scope when Haley, purportedly after consulting the African linguist Dr. Jan Vansina, learned that certain words his grandmother had spoken were similar to the language spoken by the Mandingo people of Gambia. With the help of another advance, this time from Reader’s Digest, Haley traveled to Gambia, eventually locating the region where his ancestor Kunta was abducted. While there, Haley claims to have spoken with a griot—a village historian trained from a young age to memorize and recite an account of the important events that transpired in village life. The griot allegedly told Haley of a villager named Kunta, the eldest son of Omoro Kinte, who disappeared while chopping wood. Haley, convinced he had found the link between his ancestry in colonial America and Gambia, was ecstatic. Over 12 years he researched and wrote this quasi-historical, semifictional story of his family, during which he frequented archives, interviewed relatives, and even traveled to Liberia, taking a ship from there to America to help him reenact the Middle Passage his ancestor Kunta Kinte endured. Roots tells the story of Haley’s maternal ancestors, their passage to the United States, and their lives as slaves. The book begins with Kinte (Kintay), the young rebellious slave, before he is captured in Gambia and sold into slavery in 1767. It follows the family through their trials, describing the hardship of slave life, until they are emancipated in 1865. The narrative ends in the present day, as Haley reflects on the significance of his family’s story. The original version of the novel appeared in condensed form in Reader’s Digest; the full-length work earned critical praise and topped best-seller lists. A year after publication of the

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complete book, the 12-hour Roots miniseries aired on ABC January 23–30, 1977, seen by an estimated 120 million viewers. ABC’s televised version of the novel propelled both the book and the author into overnight fame; Haley and Roots became household names. Significantly, the series defied network expectations, drew an enormous audience, helped redefine black-oriented programming, and spawned a new television genre: the multiple-evening series. Roots had a significant impact on literary and television history. To appreciate Haley’s contribution to popular culture, the cultural context of America at the time he published Roots must be considered: Haley struck a cord with many Americans, offering a well-documented narrative that traced the history of African-American oppression and African-American culture, related from the perspective of individual characters and on a human scale. In 1977, Haley received the Pulitzer Prize for Roots, as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s) Spingarn Medal. In a survey of university and college administrators conducted by Scholastic Magazine, Haley was selected as one of America’s foremost literary figures. By December 1978, Roots had sold almost 5 million copies and had been reprinted in 23 languages. In 1979, ABC aired a second miniseries, Roots: The Next Generation, also written by Haley, which chronicled the family history up until the publishing of Roots. James Earl Jones played Haley’s character, shown interviewing the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell and researching his family saga. After the phenomenal success of Roots, Haley’s reputation was tarnished when the author faced plagiarism charges. Margaret Walker Alexander, AfricanAmerican poet and novelist, author of Jubilee (1966) and winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, charged Haley with copyright infringement on April 20, 1977. Eventually the charges were dropped, but Haley incurred $100,000 in legal fees. Harold Courlander, a white specialist on AfricanAmerican folklore, also charged Haley with plagiarism, contending that large passages from Roots were taken from his novel The African (1968). In an interview held after Haley’s death, Judge Robert Ward told the interviewer Philip Nobile he would have

ruled against Haley and had considered charging him with perjury. But on the eve of Judge Ward’s decision, Haley agreed to pay Courlander $650,000, and the case was closed, with Haley conceding that he incorporated passages from Courlander’s work. Despite the scandal, Haley continued to write. In 1988, he held a promotional tour for his novella A Different Kind of Christmas, which tells of slave escapes in the United States before the Civil War. The story focuses on Fletcher Randall, the son of slave-holding Southern parents, who meets a family of Quaker abolitionists while studying at Princeton. Interestingly, Haley paints the portrait of a man who initially defends slavery but grows to see it as an evil institution. Ultimately Randall works as an agent for the Underground Railroad, helping slaves escape to freedom. In the same year, Haley also promoted a drama, Roots: The Gift, a two-hour television special that chronicles the story of two principal characters (slaves) from Roots who make a break for freedom on Christmas Eve. Haley nearly completed a final novel, Queen (1993), which tells the story of a mulatto woman who struggles with her identity. Originally intended to have the same scope as Roots, with Haley tracing his paternal genealogy through his grandmother’s rapist slave master to the shores of Ireland, Queen was finished by David Stevens and published as Alex Haley’s Queen. It was subsequently adapted for the screen in 1993, with the acclaimed actress Halle Berry playing the main character. Thematically, the story explores the hardships and prejudices experienced by a mulatto who overcomes staggering odds to develop her own identity. During Queen’s life, she is ridiculed by the black slaves as a child and hated by most of the whites, especially the wife of James Jackson, a man who loves Queen. She tries to pass for white on occasion but is never comfortable living a lie. Many of her own people distrust her; she is treated as an outcast. The story focuses on the struggles of biracial individuals and the fear of miscegenation during a time when biracialism was not tolerated. Besides chronicling Queen’s life, the novel explores the complicated relationship between blacks and whites, sweeping from the antebellum South through the Civil War and Reconstruction era to the dawn of the 20th century. Miscegenation, the

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mixing or interbreeding of different races or ethnic groups, especially the interbreeding or sexual union of whites and nonwhites, greatly interested Haley. He, like many African Americans, was a product of generational race mixing common on plantations during slavery; the rape and abuse of slave women were implicitly acceptable practices that were unpunished privileges of white slave owners, who often committed such offenses without criminal repercussions. Queen details these offenses and the emotional quest of its protagonist, Queen, a fictionalized version of Haley’s paternal grandmother, who seeks to know her father and ultimately deduces he is the slave master. Although James Jackson never acknowledges his daughter, the novel does detail how Queen makes her way in the world, marrying a former slave named Haley and bearing three sons who carry her lineage. Haley’s minor works include an unfi nished fictionalized recounting of his childhood tentatively entitled “Henning.” In a similar vein, he collaborated with Norman Lear to create the television series Palmerstown, USA (1980), which was loosely based on his childhood in Tennessee. Haley also started work on a biography of Frank Willis, the security guard who revealed the Watergate break-in, an act that eventually caused the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. In 1987, Haley returned to Tennessee to live on a 127-acre estate north of Knoxville after residing in Beverly Hills, California, for a number of years. He died of a heart attack at a hospital in Seattle, Washington. When Haley died in 1992, he was $1.5 million in debt. One year later his reputation as a scholar and journalist was again called into question when, in February 1993, Philip Nobile, after examining the Haley papers deposited at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and interviewing many people connected to the book, concluded in a famous Village Voice cover story: “In fact, virtually every genealogical claim in Haley’s story was false. Haley’s account of his African fieldwork, particularly his encounter with the griot—the heart and soul of Roots, was complete fiction. Documents and tapes in Haley’s University of Tennessee archives reveal that Haley’s family history was fabricated from the beginning.”

Despite Haley’s questionable research and use of sources without crediting them, Roots remains an important work, one that marked a critical juncture in understanding the black experience and, as did Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, created a cultural sensation. The Autobiography of Malcolm X stands as one of the most significant sources on the life of this prominent member of Black Islam, an indispensable tool accessible to all, one that continues to be read, written about, and studied. A memorial to Alex Haley and Kunta Kinte was unveiled in 2002 in Annapolis, Maryland, on the site where Kinte fi rst set foot on American soil. The Alex Haley Museum also opened in Annapolis in 2002.

Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) Roots: The Saga of an American Family was highly anticipated and immensely popular at the time of its publication. The two popular miniseries it spawned became some of the most-watched television programs of all time, with more than half of the American populace seeing at least one episode of the saga. Roots reached a diverse racial audience and inspired many to learn about their ancestry. The American genealogy craze that swept the country after Roots was published was widely attributed to Haley’s work. Roots dramatized an often-neglected chapter in America’s history and inspired many African Americans to connect with their long-lost African ancestry. Wrapped within the profound story of one family’s difficult journey from freedom to slavery and eventual return to freedom, Roots revealed the complexities of African-American identity to a national audience and helped revitalize the dialogue on race. Set in Gambia, West Africa, and the southern United States from 1750 to 1967, the novel begins in a small African village named Juffure with the birth of a son, Kunta, to Omoro and Binta Kinte. Kunta, a Mandinka warrior, is captured and taken on a British slave ship to Annapolis, Maryland. The book records the horrors of the Middle Passage, the cruelties and deprivations of slavery, the breakup of families, economic and sexual exploitation, the rise of abolitionist

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engagement, the Civil War, emancipation, and eventually the prosperity of the Haley family. The fi rst part of Roots is a bildungsroman—a story of Kunta’s passage from innocent adolescence to adulthood. Kunta flourishes in Juffure, learning of his place in the world through the stories of his elders, eventually assuming the responsibility of tending to his father’s goats and attending school. This development of Kunta into an adult, a future Mandinka warrior, is interrupted by his tragic capture and enslavement. Gathering wood in the forest near his village so that he can make a new drum, Kunta is abducted and placed on a slave ship bound for America. Bought in Annapolis by John Waller, who gives him the name Toby and takes him back to his plantation to work, Kunta tries to escape four times before he is horrifically punished: forced to choose between having one of his feet amputated and castration, Kunta chooses the former, disfigured for the rest of his life. After being bought by his brother, the physician William Waller, Kunta falls in love with Bell, the household’s cook, as she helps him recover. Since he can no longer escape, Kunta drives the doctor around in his carriage. In the course of his travels with Waller, Kunta hears of news from abroad, most notably of Toussaint Louverture’s slave revolt in Haiti, which bolsters Kunta’s rebellious spirit. Haley, using the news Kunta receives as a narrative device, writes of other historical personages, interjecting corrective accounts of what the founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton thought about slavery. Told by a third-person narrator, the novel focuses primarily on Kunta, Haley’s most fully developed character. Yet the use of third-person narration enables the reader to see the development of other, minor characters, such as Kizzy (the daughter of Kunta and Bell); her clever and resourceful son, Chicken George; and Tom Murray (George’s son). Although Bell (Kunta’s future wife) and his complacent friend, the fiddler, are one-dimensional or “flat” characters, they provide points of view that differ from that of Kunta, who never fully acquiesces to authority. With other characters, Haley provides readers with poignant psychological portraits. For example,

when Kizzy (the daughter of Kunta and Bell) is sold away from the Waller plantation, the narrative follows her, recording her actions and thoughts on the Lea plantation, consequently showing the emotional and psychological effects of separation and environment. Using this device, the narrative moves from generation to generation, from Kunta Kinte to the author’s mother, Bertha Palmer Haley. Roots details the African-American search for identity while lamenting the loss of African culture. The patriarchal Muslim society in which Kunta Kinte would have thrived has been irrevocably taken from him. By following Kunta’s journey, the reader witnesses the horrors of the Middle Passage, feels the disorientation of being plucked from one’s homeland and thrust into an alien world, and experiences the confining spaces left to those of other cultures as they painfully struggle to assert their own traditions in the face of coerced assimilation. Forced to live in a radically different culture and denied the most basic of human rights, Kunta must come to terms with his new subservient place in the world, a place filled with pain and humiliation. Victimized by the institution of slavery, which denies his status as a human being, Kunta is considered chattel, often treated worse than the animals he once tended. As are the majority of slaves, Kunta is treated as a child and has no control over his own life. Haley’s belief that one “can never enslave somebody who knows who he is” animates the novel. Thus, the quest for freedom and the search for identity help give the epic story continuity: As does Kunta, the fi rst four generations persevere in the face of adversity, embracing the belief that someday they will be free. Thus, Chicken George refuses to relinquish his dream of saving his family from servitude. As he grows older, Chicken George becomes the apprentice to Uncle Mingo, quickly mastering the art of training gamecocks. Often absent, George is not a faithful husband, but he is a loving father, who, despite his infidelity, lives for his family. Planning to buy their freedom with money he has saved from cockfighting, he loses it all when Tom Lea—with George’s consent—bets too much. Forced to travel to England and work for Lord John Russell, George eventually returns to fi nd that his family has been

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sold. Lea grants him freedom, however, and George recovers his family at the Murray plantation. Roots deals with fundamental human rights, setting human dignity as a foil against the institution of slavery. The novel speaks proudly to African Americans, offering a story of hope while proffering Africa as a source of historical continuity, a place of origins. Since few have genealogical or historical records of their ancestry, Roots continues to inspire African Americans to reconnect with their African forebears. Haley explains that he assumed this task in part because he recognized how fortunate his family was when compared to many other African-American families, whose “roots” have been irrevocably severed. Near the end of the novel, Haley intrudes as a fi rst-person narrator; doing so enables him to outline the novel’s purpose and serve as a mediating presence affecting how the novel is interpreted. Haley’s character, ruminating near the end of novel, reveals the grand vision the author had for Roots: Flying homeward from Dakar, I decided to write a book. My own ancestors would automatically also be a symbolic saga of all African-descent people—who are without exception the seeds of someone like Kunta who was born and grew up in some black African village, someone who was captured and chained down in one of those slave ships that sailed them across the same ocean, into some succession of plantations, and since then a struggle for freedom.

With this comment, it becomes apparent that the narrator envisions himself as a modern-day griot, narrating the history of his culture for the benefit of all African Americans. Haley, the author and narrator, hopes Roots will instill a sense of regaining the past a sense of cultural awareness that will make for a tolerable present and enable African Americans to envision a promise-filled future.

For Discussion or Writing 1. One of the significant themes of Roots is Haley’s quest to discover his genealogy by traveling back to Africa; in a tireless effort to connect his African and American identities, he spent 12 years researching his long-lost African ancestry. How

2.

3.

4.

5.

do you think Haley’s perception of himself as an African American changed after discovering his genealogical African tribe? What emotional and psychological effects do you think it had on him? Roots details how individual family members are sold without regard for emotional needs, psychological effects, or familial ties. What are the repercussions that the characters face when these ties are broken? How can we ever justify the breaking of a family bond? Song of Solomon (1977), Toni Morrison’s lyrical novel, recounts the story of a black man searching for his ancestry, his connection with the past. Read the novel, compare, and contrast the theme of lost identity with Haley’s Roots. Read the folktale collected in The People Could Fly by Virginia Hamilton and then write an essay that discusses the cultural and psychological relevance of flying Africans in the lives of slaves. Why did many believe this myth? How does the oral tradition contribute to the story’s legacy and magic? Compare Haley’s use of the myth of the people who could fly with Toni Morrison’s use of the same myth in Song of Solomon. How are the two similar; how do they differ? Why would both authors use this same story?

WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Adams, Russell. “An Analysis of the Roots Phenomenon in the Context of American Racial Conservatism.” Présence Africaine 116, no. 4 (1980): 125–140. Blayney, Michael Steward. “Roots and the Noble Savage.” North Dakota Quarterly 54 (Winter 1986): 1–17. Gerber, David. “Haley’s Roots and Our Own: An Inquiry into the Nature of a Popular Phenomenon.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 5 (Fall 1977): 87–111. Kunte Kinte-Alex-Haley Foundation, Inc. Available online. URL: http://www.kintehaley.org/. Accessed March 25, 2009. Mills, Gary B., and Elizabeth Shown Mills. “The Genealogist’s Assessment of Alex Haley’s Roots.” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 72 (1984): 35–49. Moore, Jesse T. “Alex Haley’s Roots: Ten Years Later.” Western Journal of Black Studies 18 (1994): 70–76. Nobile, Philip. “Uncovering Roots.” Village Voice, February 23, 1993.

Blake G. Hobby

Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) Though it be a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic, to be young, gifted and black! (speech to United Negro College Fund scholarship winners, May 1964)

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orraine Vivian Hansberry was born on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, to Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry, on May 19, 1930. The youngest of four children, she had an older sister, Mamie, and two older brothers, Carl, Jr., and Perry. The Hansberrys were both educated, cultured southern natives. A former schoolteacher, her mother met her father while working at his Lake Street Bank. By the time Lorraine was born, seven years after her youngest sibling, Mr. Hansberry was a prominent businessman who maintained and rented several properties on Chicago’s South Side. The Hansberrys taught their children to value family and their cultural heritage above all else. Their dinner table was a place of political and social discussion. Her parents encouraged the children to develop their own opinions about political, social, and cultural events and present them intelligently. Hansberry was doubtlessly influenced by many of her family’s dinner guests, among them the poet Langston Hughes, the well-known actor/singer Paul Robeson, the musical legend Duke Ellington, the sociologist/political activist/writer W. E. B. DuBois, the director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Walter White, the Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens, and her uncle, Leo Hansberry, one of the first scholars of African antiquity and history and a professor at Howard University. Hanberry’s political sensitivity developed at a defining moment in 1935, when, at the age of five,

her parents gave her a white fur coat, hat, and muff for Christmas. Although the Hansberrys were a middle-class family, it was the middle of the depression and such a luxurious gift seemed extravagant even to a young girl. After winter break her parents insisted she wear the gift to school—a school fi lled with classmates whose parents were struggling to find work and put food on the table. She was ridiculed and even beaten. Those moments of shame and alienation served as the inspiration for one of her first stories and molded her into the woman she later became. To understand Hansberry it is important to know about the period in which she was born. In the 1930s and 1940s black families were victims of segregation regardless of their social status. Jim Crow laws in the South forced African Americans to drink from separate water fountains and sit in the back of buses. From 1916 to 1948 racially restrictive laws called covenants gave white property owners a legal right not to sell based only on the buyer’s race, thereby creating an area known as the “Black Belt” on Chicago’s South Side. Carl Hansberry, helped by NAACP lawyers and white realtors, discovered a loophole in the covenant of one all-white neighborhood. In 1937, he secretly bought two pieces of property. When the family moved into their home on Rhodes Avenue, the neighborhood responded violently, making it clear that the Hansberrys were not wanted. Hansberry was outside playing when a neighborhood mob

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began to amass. As she and her family gathered in the front room, a brick flew through the front window, barely missing Lorraine’s head. Family friends soon arrived to help guard the house through the night. It was not until a friend went onto the porch with a shotgun that the mob dispersed (McKissack 25). Another pivotal moment in Lorraine’s life, it would later inspire her most well-known work, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry attended Englewood High School, where she excelled in English and history. She was inspired by her English teacher, Kathleen Rigby— dubbed “Pale Hecate”—who loved Shakespeare and challenged her students to live up to their potential. An awkward and overweight adolescent, Hansberry spent most of her time in her room writing poetry. In 1944 she won her first writing prize, for a short story about football. That fall, on a chaperoned date, she saw her first play, Dark of the Moon, a “folk musical.” Interested in the theater, she then attended both The Tempest and Othello, which featured her family friend Paul Robeson, who was at the pinnacle of his popularity. By spring 1945, Lorraine, aged 15, vowed to write a play herself (Cheney 8). That summer her father bought a home in Palanco, Mexico, a suburb of Mexico City. He had been struggling with high blood pressure, possibly the result of the stress due to his various antiracist lawsuits, and hoped that the change would improve his health. His health improved temporarily, but in 1946, shortly before her 16th birthday, Hansberry’s father died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Later, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Hansberry asserted that her father’s struggles against racism killed him. Back in Chicago, she was elected president of the high school debate society. Her father’s work with the NAACP lawyers against racial covenants, her Uncle Leo’s studies of ancient and modern Africa, and black students’ resistance to racial discrimination had a powerful impact on Hansberry. After graduating from Englewood High School in January 1948, she entered the University of Wisconsin, where she studied art, geology, stage design, and English. Politically active, she worked on Henry Wallace’s campaign and became the chair of the Young Progressives of America. In February 1950,

she left the university; that fall, despite the protests and warnings of her mother, she moved to New York City. In New York she continued her political activism, writing for Young Progressives of America magazine and attending classes at the New School for Social Research, where she learned about Marcus Garvey. A black nationalist and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Garvey, a pan-Africanist, advocated the back-to-Africa movement. A leader during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, he expressed ideas about racial pride and nobility that inspired many writers, politicians, and artists, as well as Hansberry and several of her contemporaries of the 1950s and 1960s, such as M ARTIN LUTHER K ING, JR ., and M ALCOLM X. Hansberry’s fi rst full-time job as a paid writer and editor began in 1951, when she was hired by Paul Robeson to work for his Harlem newspaper Freedom. She wrote a series of articles on communism, black history, and homosexuality. On a picket line at New York University (NYU) protesting the exclusion of blacks from the NYU basketball team, she met Robert Nemiroff. They began to date; Hansberry soon took the white Jewish boy home to meet her family. The family was concerned for the safety of the interracial couple, but as it was obvious they were in love, the family approved. The evening before the wedding, the couple spent the day at a protest against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Hansberry and Nemiroff were married on June 20, 1953, at her mother’s home in Chicago. Hansberry and Nemiroff were committed to art and politics; in their Greenwich Village apartment they entertained long into the night, discussing current events, plays, and fi lms. After the wedding, Hansberry quit her job as associate editor for Freedom but continued to write freelance articles. She also studied African history under her family friend W. E. B. DuBois and taught black literature at Jefferson School of Social Science. Then, in May 1954, she wrote the script for the second Harlem rally, Pulse of the Peoples: A Cultural Salute to Paul Robeson.

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In 1956, Nemiroff, then working in publishing, wrote the hit song “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” the success of which allowed Hansberry to quit working and focus on her writing full time. The result was her most critically important work, A Raisin in the Sun. She completed the first draft in 1957 and read it to a friend, the music publisher Philip Rose, one night at dinner. He immediately liked the script and optioned the play for Broadway. A play focused on a black family, concerned with black issues, and written by a black woman was an anomaly in 1957. Most investors and theaters were not willing to take the risk; however, for the next year Rose looked tirelessly, exhausting all resources before finally convincing Harry Belafonte and other black cultural leaders to invest small amounts in a production of the play (Cheney 25). In January and February 1959 auditions were held for A Raisin in the Sun in New Haven, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Hansberry’s friend Sidney Poitier was cast as the lead, Walter Lee Younger. As director he suggested Lloyd Richards. Directing jobs for black directors were scarce in the 1950s, and Richards, a Broadway actor and up-and-coming director, leaped at the opportunity to work on the play despite the fact that it was written by an unknown playwright (McKissack 73). No New York theater would produce the show, so Rose and his coproducer David Cogan arranged for performances in New Haven and Philadelphia. Great reviews prompted the Schuberts to move the play to Hansberry’s hometown of Chicago and then to Broadway as soon as a theater opened up. A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway at the Barrymore Theater on March 11, 1959. It was acclaimed by audiences and critics alike. Competing against plays written by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Archibald MacLeish, A Raisin in the Sun won the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. At just 29 years old, Lorraine Hansberry was the fi rst African American, the youngest playwright, and only the fifth woman to win the coveted prize. In her acceptance speech she said, “I can not adequately tell you what recognition and tribute mean to the young writer. . . . One works, one dreams, and, if one is lucky, one actually produces. But true fulfi llment

only comes when our fellows say: ‘Ah, we understand, we appreciate, we enjoy.’” (McKissack 80). As with many plays that deal with complex social issues, A Raisin in the Sun caused controversy. Some critics argued that the themes were so universal that the family might as well have been white—a claim that Hansberry vehemently disputed—while others felt that the play was too centered on the black experience. Regardless, Hansberry’s career as a writer was established. Later that year, she was commissioned by NBC to write The Drinking Gourd, the fi rst in a series of televised dramas about the Civil War. She chose slavery as her topic, the title based on a spiritual, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which communicated information about the Underground Railroad. Her intention was to create an honest portrayal of slavery and debunk the Hollywood myth about happy singing slaves. Although recognizing it as powerful and well written, NBC rejected the script as too controversial. The fi lm was never made. Her television and fi lm career far from over, she was hired to write the screen adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun. Excited about her play’s reaching a wider audience but nervous about changes the studio might want to make to the script, Hansberry maintained rights to the project. In 1960 she completed the screenplay, and the studio made minimal changes. Shot in Chicago in 1961, A Raisin in the Sun starred Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee and premiered in Chicago to packed houses of both blacks and whites. The fi lm was enormously successful. It was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay, and it won an award for Outstanding Human Values at the Cannes Film Festival. The next two years were prolific for Hansberry. She wrote several new plays—Les Blancs, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (originally titled “The Sign in Jenny Reed’s Window”), What Use Are Flowers?—and several other works that were never produced. She became increasingly involved in politics, writing newspaper editorials, supporting activities of the southern freedom movement, even challenging then–attorney general Robert Kennedy on civil rights policies, and meeting the Black Power movement leader, M ALCOLM X.

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In June 1963, months after moving out of New York City to Croton-on-Hudson, Hansberry was diagnosed with cancer of the duodenum—part of the digestive system. While undergoing two surgeries, she continued her work, writing articles and lecturing. She also wrote captions for The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, a photojournal documenting the Civil Rights movement. Although she named Robert Nemiroff her literary executor in her will and continued to collaborate with him, the couple obtained a secret Mexican divorce in 1964. Her next play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, opened at the Longacre Theater on October 15, 1964, to mixed reviews. It was the first time a black playwright had written about white characters, and many people felt she had abandoned the black causes most identified with her work. Hansberry was admitted to University Hospital the day after the play opened; she had lost her sight and had fallen into a coma. Nemiroff struggled to keep the play open, enlisting actors and friends to use time and money to keep the show running. Over the next several weeks, Hansberry improved. She regained her sight and spent the holidays in the hospital surrounded by friends and family. She lost her struggle with cancer on January 12, 1965. That night the curtain closed on The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window after 101 performances. Her funeral was held at a small church in Harlem on January 15, and she was buried in Croton-onHudson. After Hansberry’s death, Nemiroff dedicated himself to her work. In 1969, four years after her death, he published To Be Young Gifted and Black, a collection of her essays. He developed the book into a play, which opened at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. The show toured nationally in 1970–72, reaching a wide and diverse audience and influencing many young writers. Nemiroff completed Les Blancs in 1970 and edited and published a collection of Hansberry’s work, Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, which includes The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers? In 1973, Nemiroff produced Raisin, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, which won a Tony Award for the best Broadway musical.

A Raisin in the Sun (1959) Opening on Broadway in March 1959, A Raisin in the Sun changed the course of American theater history. For the first time ever, theatergoers witnessed a Broadway play written by a black woman, which celebrated black culture and portrayed black resistance to white oppression across generations. This groundbreaking work opened the door for other African-American playwrights. It was a landmark in American theater—a trailblazer for black theater that allowed others to get work produced. Woodie King states in his 1979 Freedomways article, “To mention all of the artists whose careers were enhanced by their encounters with Hansberry and A Raisin in the Sun would read like a Who’s Who in the black theater” (King 221). Strongly influenced by Harlem Renaissance writers such as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, Hansberry sought to overcome stereotyped images of African Americans, reclaiming interest and pride in ancestry, while avoiding the romanticizing and exoticism that writers of that period often exhibited. A Raisin in the Sun was originally titled “Crystal Stair,” based on a line from the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son,” in which a mother encourages her son to be strong even though life is a struggle. Hansberry abandoned the working title for a line in another Hughes poem, “Harlem.” In it Hughes asks the question, “What happens to a dream deferred / Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” While both titles are apt—the play is certainly about a mother-and-son relationship—unfulfilled dreams, dreams deferred, seem to be the central themes of the play, linking all the central characters. Mama Younger dreams of providing a safe home for her family, Walter Lee dreams of becoming a successful businessman, Ruth dreams of raising her children in a home with a yard for them to play in, Beneatha dreams of becoming a doctor, while her boyfriend, Joseph Asagai, dreams of returning to Africa to be a leader for his people. The potential for her characters exists side by side with the reality of the life they live within their cramped apartment. Set in the Youngers’ apartment in Chicago’s South Side Black Belt, A Raisin in the Sun is a domestic, or “kitchen sink,” drama. The Younger

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family, Mama (Lena) Younger; her son Walter Lee and his wife, Ruth; their son, Travis; and Mama’s daughter Beneatha all live in a roach-infested apartment, each chained to a low-paying service job— Walter a chauffer, Ruth and Mama both domestics. A life insurance check for Mama’s deceased husband, Big Walter, arrives, and their dreams of a better life become possible. Each character dreams of money. It is Mama’s money, but in order to support Walter Lee and establish his role as the head of the family, she gives it to him to handle—asking him to put aside a certain amount for his sister, Beneatha’s, medical school education. Tragically, Walter Lee uses all of the money to buy a liquor store and is swindled by an unworthy friend, a friend all of the family has cautioned Walter to distrust. Hansberry’s realistic style creates complex, distinct, flawed characters who allow readers to look beyond stereotypes and see “everyman” engaged in family conflict. The issues at stake in A Raisin in the Sun are more than the generational and marital conflicts in a family power struggle; they are about larger ideological conflicts and social issues: poverty, race, religion, women’s rights, integrity, freedom, and cultural identity. In an interview about writing, Hansberry discussed how her works’ realism demanded the imposition of a point of view, showing the audience not only what is, but also what is possible. In a period when many of her contemporaries were involved in the theater of the absurd, which laughs in the face of despair, Hansberry “strove for something more meaningful” (Carter 126). The universality of the issues depicted in A Raisin in the Sun caused even those critics who praised it to misunderstand the central issue of race. Misinterpreting a Hansberry quote from a New York Times interview in which she stated that it was not a “negro play,” many critics began to write that the play could just as easily have been about a white family. Other critics believed that the play was a pro-integration statement. Hansberry was incensed. While she had focused on specifics to create universal truths, she felt very strongly that her play was about an AfricanAmerican family, and not just an African-American family, an African-American South Side Chicago family. Attempting to clarify her vision, Hansberry

said, “The thing I tried to show was the many gradations even in one Negro family, the clash of the old and the new, but most of all the unbelievable courage of the Negro People” (Dannett 62). While she admitted that multigenerational self-sacrificing love was universal, she insisted that her play was intended to be a microcosm for the black experience in America. In a letter to her mother on the night of the play’s New Haven opening, Hansberry wrote: Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people—Negroes and life and I think it will help a lot of people understand how we are just as complicated as they are—and just as mixed up—but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks—people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what, after all the laughter and tears, the play is supposed to say. I hope it will make you very proud. (McKissack 77–78)

Hansberry refuted the charges of critics—black and white—that the central message of the play was assimilationist. Although Hansberry was from a middle-class family, she saw firsthand the tension between wanting to assimilate and maintaining pride in one’s own culture. In A Raisin in the Sun, the Youngers want to move to the white neighborhood not to integrate but to stand firm against those people who want to keep them out because of their skin color. In “First Light of a New Day,” Aishah Rahman makes a claim for the essential blackness of the play: “Hansberry also realized that in order to possess a comprehensive world view, black writers must first look inward, and toward their own people. This was the seminal philosophy of the black arts movement of the ’60s and made Hansberry the literary foremother of the writers of that period” (quoted in Carter 64). Throughout the play the characters of Beneatha and Joseph Asagai weigh what it means to be African with what it means to be an African American. In exploring the idea of not truly belonging to either culture, the influence of Hansberry’s mentor W. E. B. DuBois is clear. DuBois spoke of a double consciousness existing within the African-American population in his groundbreaking book The Souls of Black Folk:

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“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (DuBois 9). Through the poetry of her characters’ speech, Hansberry reveals information about them and adds depth to her drama. With the Younger family, she presents three generations of people with individual speech patterns, musical tastes, and religious beliefs. Yet all are survivors in an oppressive environment trying to make a better future for themselves. The language used for the different characters, black and white, are so accurate that they add authenticity, credibility, and a sense of realism. The variety of speech patterns for the characters reflects the variety of education, social level, interest, opinions, and awareness of oppression. It depicts the breadth of African-American culture. For example, the wisdom in Mama’s speech to Beneatha after Walter Lee has lost her medical school tuition in his bad business scheme is accentuated by Hansberry’s use of rhythm, repetition, and metaphor: Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and your family ’cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well, then you ain’t done learning— because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest point and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so. When you start to measure somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is. (135–136)

While most of the dialogue in the play realistically ranges from Mama’s southern-influenced

dialect to Joseph Asagai’s African colonial speech patterns, there is one expressionistic section. In the scene when Walter Lee returns home drunk and fi nds Beneatha dressed in a traditional Nigerian robe and performing a dance of welcome to recorded Nigerian music, he is drawn into the ritual himself, posturing as an African warlord, a man he might have been in a different country at a different time, saying: “Listen my black brothers. . . . Do you hear the screeching of the cocks in yonder hills beyond where the chiefs meet in council for the coming of the mighty war. . . . Do you hear the singing of the women, singing the war songs of our fathers to the babies in the great houses . . . singing the sweet war songs? OH, DO YOU HEAR, MY BLACK BROTHERS!” (69–70). Through Walter Lee’s poetic speech and Beneatha’s interest in her African heritage Hansberry expresses her pan-Africanism on stage and suggests the importance of understanding one’s heritage. Hansberry makes clear that African history is every bit as important to the Youngers and all African Americans as is European history to many European-Americans. In contrast, when Walter Lee is considering sacrificing his integrity by selling the house back to Mr. Lindner, his speech and actions mimic those of the degrading American minstrel show of mid-1800s to early 1900s: “Captain, Mistuh, Bossman. A-hee-heehee! Yasssssuh! Great White Father, just gi’ ussen de money, fo’ God’s sake, and we’s ain’t gwine come out deh and dirty up yo’ white folks neighborhood.” (134). In this scene Walter Lee’s character hits an alltime low and his dialogue reflects his desperation. In addition to dialect, Hansberry uses music throughout the play to explore, define, and encourage her characters. Jazz, blues, spirituals, and African tribal music are interjected throughout the play. At one scene’s conclusion, when Mama feels down, she asks Ruth to sing her a spiritual, “Sing that ‘No Ways Tired.’” That song always lifts me up so—” (38). Walter Lee finds relief from the stress in his life at the Green Hat, a little jazz bar: “You know what I like about the Green Hat? I like this little cat they got here who blows the sax . . . he’s all music” (93). And a rare scene of tenderness between Ruth and Walter Lee depicts them slow dancing to a blues record.

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A Raisin in the Sun has earned its place as a hallmark of American drama like that of A RTHUR MILLER’s contemporaneous play Death of a Salesman. By exploring diversity and universal themes, presenting a variety of personal relationships and human aspirations, celebrating black music, history, and culture through the black perspective and black experience, Hansberry created a work of art that is as relevant today as it was almost 50 years ago. The central truth of the play that every individual must make his or her own life still speaks to audiences today: “What lifts the play, ultimately, into art of a high order is Hansberry’s ability to set our imaginations on fire about the extraordinariness of ordinary people, and therefore of ourselves” (Carter 260).

For Discussion or Writing 1. A Raisin in the Sun is a classic American drama and as such it has been compared to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, both of which are family-centered dramas that deal with American identity and American culture. Thinking about both families and the central issues each play explores, write a well-developed essay that compares and contrasts the two plays. 2. How does Hansberry’s use of language help identity and “deepen” her characters? Examine the differences in the dialects of Mama Younger, Walter Lee, Beneatha, and Joseph Asagai. How does their language inform the audience about their character? 3. Mama’s plant is a powerful symbol in the play. What is its significance to Mama, to Ruth, and to the play as a whole? 4. It is very important to Beneatha to get in touch with her African roots. Many critics have suggested that her character is loosely based on Hansberry. On the basis of your knowledge of Hansberry’s life, trace the autobiographical elements in the play and then write a persuasive essay that explores those connections. Be sure to indicate, in terms of your research, whether you believe Beneatha’s voice speaks for Hansberry or not, qualifying every statement with details from the play and documented details from Hansberry’s life.

5. Despite the threat of moving, the family seems upbeat at the end of the play. Considering that Hansberry herself was a victim of violence during integration, write an essay that accounts for the tone at the end of the play.

“On Summer” (1960) Lorraine Hansberry drew on her life growing up in South Side Chicago as inspiration for much of her writing. “On Summer” is an autobiographical essay in which Hansberry reminisces about her childhood, recalling in particular her dislike of summer. She remembers waking from a nap in a dark, stifling room and feeling very hot as the root of her bias against the season. From that moment on, she harbored a dislike for all things summer, “the toograiny texture of sand; the too-cold coldness of the various waters we constantly try to escape into, and the icky-perspiry feeling of bathing caps” (416). Sections of this essay are included in To Be Young Gifted and Black, a compilation of selections of her plays, poetry, and writing. Assembled as a play by Robert Nemiroff, To Be Young Gifted and Black represents 20 episodes in Hansberry’s life. The play toured nationally and was also fi lmed for television. It inspired a song, of the same title, in 1969 by Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine, Jr. In 1971, Aretha Franklin used the song as the cover for her album “Young Gifted and Black.” In “On Summer,” Hansberry recalls the urban summers of her youth—days full of street games and jump rope songs like “Mary Mack” and nights spent on screened-in porches. When nights were especially hot, she and her family would go to the park and sleep under the stars. It may have been there that she learned the art of storytelling. “Those were, of course, the best times of all because the grown-ups were invariably reminded of having been children in rural parts of the country and told the best stories then” (416–417). Hansberry also describes a summer visit at age seven or eight to her elderly grandmother’s house in Tennessee. On the drive down, her mother told her and her siblings how her father had hidden from his master in the very Kentucky

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hills through which they drove. She recalls wondering about “masters” and what they might be like. She reminisces about meeting her aging grandmother, “She was born in slavery and had memories of it and they didn’t sound anything like Gone With the Wind” (417). Despite these memories, it was not until she was an adult that Hansberry gained respect for summer. She met a cancer patient at a lodge in Maine whose tenacity, courage, and fighting spirit she very much admired. In speaking of her, she could be describing herself: “She had also been of [the] radical viewpoint all her life; one of those people who energetically believe that the world can be changed and for the better and spend their lives doing just that” (418). Hansberry found herself desperately wishing that the woman would live to see one more summer: “Through her eyes I fi nally gained the sense of what it might mean . . . the gift of another summer with its stark and intimate assertion of neither birth nor death but life at the apex; with the gentlest nights and, above all, the longest days” (419).

For Discussion or Writing 1. While “On Summer” is an autobiographical essay, Hansberry’s plays also contain biographical elements. Read “On Summer,” noting the many biographical details it supplies. Then read one of her plays. How does Hansberry use her own life in her dramas? With that in mind, write a well-developed essay on the relationship between history and fiction in the works of Lorraine Hansberry. 2. On the basis of what you know about Hansberry’s family life, why do you think that Hansberry was confused about who and what a master might be? 3. What is the effect of Hanberry’s colloquial language in the essay, such as icky-perspiry and artsily-craftsily? Does such language convey important aspects of Hansberry’s cultural experiences? Why or why not? With that in mind, why is it significant that Hansberry weaves such creative expressions in her analytical writings? What does this language suggest about Hansberry’s view of truth and understanding?

4. How do the abundant anecdotes and memories within the essay add to your understanding of the author’s childhood? How do they influence your understanding of her work as an adult?

The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964) “The main burden of Negro aspiration remains what it has always been: total integration into the fabric of a nation which our slave fathers helped to create. EQUALITY: economic, political, social, civil” (50). The year 1963 was pivotal in the Civil Rights movement. As riots erupted in the South, Eugene “Bull” Connor, the police commissioner of Birmingham Alabama, responded with fire hoses and dogs. People across the nation joined organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC,) cofounded by Martin Luther King, Jr., to help effect policy change by increasing voter registration. Hansberry, along with JAMES BALDWIN and a select group of performers and activists, met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to discuss civil rights. There are many different versions of what happened at the meeting. According to one source Hansberry asked for a moral commitment; however, when the talk turned to handing out weapons to aid in the struggle, Kennedy felt he had lost control of the meeting, and Hansberry, seeing that they were not getting anywhere, left. It was a devastating year personally, socially, and politically for Hansberry. Baldwin and Hansberry were sharply criticized for their perceived militancy in the meeting with Kennedy. The Kennedy administration was popular among black southern voters, and many people did not want to alienate a government they felt was on their side. In addition to her cancer diagnosis, there was the bombing of a church in Birmingham, which killed four young girls; Medgar W. Evers, NAACP field secretary and war hero, was gunned down in his front yard; and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. While Hansberry’s friends were attending the famous March on Washington, demonstrating for equal rights, more

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jobs, and civil rights legislation, she was preparing for surgery. She listened to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, “I Have a Dream” speech in her hospital bed. It was announced at the march that Hansberry’s mentor, W. E. B. DuBois, had died in Ghana at the age of 95. As the Hansberry biographers the McKissacks state, “The sad irony, of course, is that many of the young civil rights volunteers who were there that day didn’t even know who DuBois was or that their work was a fulfillment of his dream” (McKissack, 127). The year 1964 was one of great social upheaval as well. That summer there were riots in major cities across America. Hansberry responded with The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, a photo documentary of the Civil Rights movement. Hansberry worked on the book between radiation treatments. Despite her weakness and deteriorating health, she remained a determined activist. Published by the SNCC in 1964, The Movement contains stirring commentary accompanying Danny Lyon’s poignant photographs. The photos are of ordinary people, black and white, involved in the struggle for equality. There are photos of lynchings, sit-ins, demonstrations, and the effects of racial violence. The subjects are young and old, churchgoers, students, and protesters, all either victims of poverty and injustice or those demanding basic human rights, all emphasizing the historical background of injustice in the United States. She draws readers in with a variety of quotes ranging from southern ministers to Muslim doctrine, slave insurrectionists to NAACP chapter heads, everyday workers to leaders such as Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and DuBois. Her commentary and Lyon’s photographs of the rural South’s inhabitants remind readers that racism is not the only cause of suffering and that poverty among both blacks and whites is a persistent problem that needs to be addressed. Hansberry sums up the last photograph perfectly. It is a photo of a beautiful person whose short hair and high cheekbones make it hard to determine whether it is a young woman or a boy. Rain drips off the face as the eyes confront the camera with confident intelligence: “They stand in the hose fire at Birmingham; they stand in the rain at Hattiesburg. They are young, they are beautiful, they are deter-

mined. It is for us to create, now, an America that deserves them” (122).

For Discussion or Writing 1. The Movement opens with a quote from James Baldwin, “It is a terrible, an inexorable law that one can not deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own.” What is the significance of that quote to the book? 2. How is The Movement different from Hansberry’s other works? How is it similar? 3. Hansberry was influenced by two civil rights leaders with contrasting views, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. After exploring speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (perhaps Malcolm X’s “The Ballet or the Bullet” and King’s “I Have a Dream”), write a well-developed essay in which you argue whose philosophy is reflected more strongly in The Movement?

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964) Premiering on October 15, 1964, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was Lorraine Hansberry’s second and last Broadway play before her death three months later. Although terminally ill with cancer when the play went into rehearsal, she and a private nurse stayed in the nearby Hotel Abby Victoria so that she could attend rehearsals whenever possible. Hansberry’s strong commitment to the humanist tradition inspired her to produce art with a message. In a letter quoted in To Be Young Gifted and Black she states: There are no plays which are not social and no plays that do not have a thesis. . . . The fact is—if (the playwright) really had nothing he wanted us to tell us; nothing he wanted to persuade us of; no partisanship he wanted to evoke—well, he wouldn’t have written a play. (119)

The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is an “idea play” full of unpopular views on feminism, homosexuality, drugs, political corruption: ideas

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that challenge society and force us to confront social issues. Hansberry’s characters are liberals, homosexuals, intellectuals, politicians, prostitutes, and members of the middle class. They talk about everything from social revolt to “deviant” sexuality. Hansberry challenged her Broadway audiences by presenting a simple idea—If you do not like things the way they are, change them. With virtually an all-white cast and scarcely a conversation about racial issues, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window challenged critics’ notions as well. There was still a popular belief that AfricanAmerican writers should deal exclusively with black characters. Instead Hansberry’s play centers around Sidney Brustein, a Jewish intellectual struggling with issues of morality and abstraction, a man learning that people are more important than creeds. A complex character and a deliberately flawed protagonist, Brustein can be cruel, racist, and unjust; however, unlike the other characters in the play, he has a distinct awareness of his imperfections, and above all, a capacity for change and growth. As was Brustein, Hansberry was a Greenwich Village intellectual and political activist. She and her husband held all-night “happenings” at their apartment with friends, artists, and poets. In reference to the play, Hansberry once said, “The silhouette of the Western intellectual poised in hesitation before the flames of involvement was an accurate symbolism of my closest friends” (Reuben). It is not surprising that the play opened to mixed reviews. The novelist John Braine notes in his foreword to the 1966 printing, “Colored men don’t behave badly, homosexuals and prostitutes have the role of victim, and plays about people like Sidney Brustein end in . . . defeat. . . . This was, in the eyes of the critics, the worst offense of all; the play ends on a note of affirmation. Sidney and Iris are going to drag themselves to their feet and keep going forward” (Sign 136). Despite its critics, the play did have a dedicated following of supporters who invested in the play and kept it running until Hansberry’s death. Her tombstone, an open book, is inscribed with the last line of the play, “Tomorrow we shall make something strong of this sorrow.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Sidney Brustein has been called the modern “everyman.” Why do you think that is? Do you agree or disagree with this assertion? Why? 2. The Sign in Sidney Burstein’s Window is a complex play that addresses many political, social, religious, and racial issues. With these issues and the play’s characterizations in mind, write an essay that explores what you think is the play’s central theme. 3. Hansberry felt that A Raisin in the Sun lacked a central character. The same has been said of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. If there is not significant, focalizing character, why is that significant? How does that lack contribute to the play’s importance and meanings? 4. Expressionism in theater is defined as “a style of playwriting and stage presentation stressing the emotional content of a play, the subjective reactions of the characters, symbolic or abstract representations of reality, and non-naturalistic techniques of scenic design” (dictionary.com). Act 2 of The Sign in Sidney Burstein’s Window opens with one of the only expressionist scenes in the play. In it Sidney is transported to the mountains, where he plays the banjo, and the Iris-ofhis-imagination arrives, hair flowing, dressed in “mountain dress,” and dances an Appalachian jig for him. What is the significance of Sidney’s fantasies about Appalachia? What do they reflect about his character? Iris no longer wishes to participate in this fantasy. What information does this give the audience about their relationship? 5. There are two drug fatalities in the play, Sal, the boy who swept floors for Sidney at the Silver Dagger, and Gloria Parodus. How are the deaths treated differently? How do both of these deaths impact the characters and the action of the play?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON HANSBERRY AND HER WORK 1. Lorraine Hansberry was a social activist, who through her plays and activism made enormous contributions to human rights and feminist orga-

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nizations. While much of her advocacy was for the Civil Rights movement, Hansberry consistently wrote articles and letters supporting feminism, black liberation, world peace, and homosexual rights. In 1952, while working for Freedom, she attended the International Peace Conference in Uruguay, in the place of Paul Robeson, whose passport was seized by the State Department while the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated him. Hansberry spoke with other feminists there and became more dedicated to speaking out about women’s rights. Upon returning to America, she joined the Daughters of Bilitis—a lesbian organization. She contributed several letters to their publication, The Ladder, supporting the lesbian movement and applauding the publication as a crucial platform for women’s publishing. Do you find evidence of Hansberry’s personal progressive views in the characters of David, Iris, Mavis, and Gloria in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window? 2. Examine the work of Harlem Renaissance writers and thinkers: Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son” and “Harlem,” Countee Cullen’s “Simon the Cyrenian Speaks” and “Heritage,” W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Paul Robeson’s amazing career as an advocate for civil and international human rights, the political views of Marcus Garvey. What influences of their work do you see in Hansberry’s oeuvre? Can you document the influence of her friends, family, and upbringing in South Side Chicago in her works? 3. The theater of the absurd is a type of drama and performance that conveys life devoid of meaning and purpose. The term was derived from an essay by Albert Camus and originally used by the critic Martin Esslin to describe the work of several playwrights, including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and Jean Genet, whose works often portray human beings inhabiting a universe without meaning or purpose. While the prevalent literary style of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is realistic, Hansberry includes a surrealistic drug-alcohol-induced scene in act 3 involving Sidney, David, and Gloria. It

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is also noteworthy that the character of David Ragin, the playwright, is an absurdist. What Use Are Flowers?, a teleplay written in 1961, is a direct response to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. What does Hansberry seem to be saying about surrealism and theater of the absurd? How do the two plays differ in their treatment of, or reaction to, the principles of the theater of the absurd? How are they similar? Hansberry was influenced by Bertold Brecht’s play Mother Courage, in which Brecht employed a form of expressionism called epic theater. The goal of epic theater, also known as theater of alienation or theater of politics, is to alienate, to distance the audience from familiar situations, so that they watch the scenes more objectively. Characters in epic drama are archetypes or stereotypes, representing opposing sides of an argument. Brecht believed that presenting ideas and allowing the audience to judge them were only achieved by this “alienation effect.” Unlike watching a realistic play, in which the audience can relax and suspend disbelief, Brecht wanted his audience to be aware that they were watching a play, and to remain at an emotional distance from the action. Write a persuasive essay that explores the influence of epic theater in Hansberry’s late works: The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? In James Baldwin’s book The Price of a Ticket, he discusses the lasting impact that Hansberry’s work has had on American theater. How does her work foster conversations on race, politics, gender, family, and culture? How does Hansberry use her work as a platform for social change? Compare Hansberry’s drama to the other plays nominated for the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’s Sweet Bird of Youth, Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, and Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. With your comparison in mind, define what makes Hansberry unique, and what qualities define her place in contemporary American drama. In his article titled “Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American

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Drama,” Christopher Bigsby states, “It was in 1959 that American playwrights, like their English predecessors, shed the chief liabilities of their earlier dramatic tradition and began to forge a new drama that could take its place with the most recent and important developments of Europe” (122). He specifically cites A Raisin in the Sun as one of the groundbreaking dramas that revealed a rejection of past American and current European models. Examples of classic American drama written before 1959 include Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Can you see a shift in “dramatic tradition”? How do these plays differ from A Raisin in the Sun? In what ways are the plays similar? WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment amid Complexity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cheney, Anne. Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Dannett, Sylvia G. L. Profiles of Negro Womanhood. Vol. 2: 20th Century. Yonkers, N.Y.: Educational Heritage, 1966. DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2003. Findlay, Robert R. “Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959–66.” In Educational Theatre Journal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969.

Hansberry, Lorraine. Lorraine Hansberry: The Collected Last Plays. Edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Random House, 1972. ———. The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964. ———. “On Summer.” In North Carolina Prentice Hall Literature: Grade Nine, Teacher’s Edition. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. ———. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Random House, 1959. ———. A Raisin in the Sun . . . the Unfilmed Original Screenplay. Edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: PLUME, 1992. ———. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. New York: Signet Books, 1966. ———. To Be Young Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Adapted by Robert Nemiroff. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969. Hughes, Langston. “Harlem.” In The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 3d ed. Edited by Alexander Allison. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970. King, Woodie, Jr. “Lorraine Hansberry’s Children: Black Artists and A Raisin in the Sun.” Freedomways 19, no. 4 (1979): 219–221. McKissack, Patricia C., and Fredrick L. McKissack. Young, Black, and Determined: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. New York: Holiday House, 1998. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 8: American Drama—Lorraine Hansberry.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/ reuben/pal/chap8/hansberry.html. Accessed October 16, 2006.

Anne Slatton

Robert Hayden (1913–1980) There is no such thing as black literature. There’s good literature and bad. And that’s all. (Quoted in American Poets since World War II, edited by Donald J. Greiner)

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orn August 4, 1913, Robert Hayden died on February 25, 1980, the day after an event celebrating his life and work at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he had studied years before and had been most recently employed. While he had been too ill to attend, a group of old friends and former students caravanned to his home, where he briefly regaled them with his stories and his humor. The next morning he was dead. Hayden was a poet both vilified and honored, for more or less the same qualities. His work at its best has been described as readily accessible from the surface yet deeply complex as it is probed. His life was full of contradictions. He discovered late in his life that the name he had used throughout it had not been his own. And though he seems to have been greatly loved by his parents, both his birth parents and adopted ones struggled for his affections in ways that left him scarred and insecure. In his life as an artist, he also struggled fi rst to fi nd his voice, to make space for creating his poetry, and then to use his poet’s voice according to his own internal lights regardless of the pressures around him. His was a life marked by struggle and confl ict yet fi lled with achievement and grace. Born Asa Bundy Sheffey, he knew himself as Robert Earl Hayden. After Ruth and Asa Sheffey separated, William and Sue Ellen Hayden of Detroit raised him from the time he was around 18 months old. The confusion about his actual name reveals the

type of unresolved tension that surrounded his early life. When he was in his 40s, his mother told him that his adoption by the Haydens had never been formal, so that his given name remained Asa Sheffey. Even though he was then an adult, this revelation shook Hayden deeply. Yet, as the poem he wrote in response to that revelation, “Names,” reveals, these very tensions and contradictions became a rich source for his art. From the beginning of his life, these tensions were manifest; his childhood, for example, was sometimes quite difficult. His family struggled at the brink of poverty “so harshened after each unrelenting day / that they were shouting-angry” (“Summertime and the Living . . .”). The Paradise Valley neighborhood he lived in was a ghetto that pulsed with the ugliness and variety of life, mostly unadorned. In several poems, most notably in “Elegies for Paradise Valley,” he examines the characters and life he encountered there, from a dead “junkie in maggots” that he could see from his bedroom window to the “Godfearing elders, even Godless grifters [who] tried as best they could to shelter [the children] there.” And still this place was full of richness and disregarded beauty like the sunflowers and the children. Added to the burden of the poverty surrounding him was Hayden’s extremely poor eyesight. Until his death, he required thick “Coke-bottle” glasses. Because he was so nearsighted, he was never drawn to the kinds of sports and physical activities expected of boys, and he felt

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that both the fathers in his life were disappointed in him. Yet this was also a mixed blessing. Lacking sports skills, living in the midst of harsh surroundings, and knowing an often-tense family life, Hayden retreated into books. William Hayden (“Pa Hayden”) was a laborer and a staunch fundamentalist Christian, a longtime member in good standing of the Second Baptist Church to which Hayden himself would belong while he was a member of that household. Pa Hayden forbade playing jazz and blues that Robert and Sue Hayden loved, on religious principle. And although he seems to have wished that his son would have spent a little less time in books, he always wanted Robert to “get something in his head” and did all he could to support Robert’s efforts to get an education. Some of William Hayden’s complexities are immortalized in one of Hayden’s most frequently anthologized works, “Those Winter Sundays,” in which Hayden reflects on his own limited understanding as a child: What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? (“Those Winter Sundays” ll. 13–14)

His relationship with his mothers was likewise complicated and fruitful. Rose Sheffey, his birth mother, introduced him to the arts and to a creative world beyond the poor streets of Paradise Valley, the Detroit neighborhood where he grew up. Even though her continued presence in his life caused tension, she also seemed to understand him best, helping him get music lessons initially and taking him to shows and entertainments when he visited her in Buffalo, New York. His adopted mother, Sue Ellen Hayden, had her own set of conflicts with her husband (William was her second husband), and she was also struggling with pressures that Hayden as a child did not understand. Yet turning his adult eye toward their confl icts, he produced another significant poem, “The Whipping.” And in “The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westfield,” he provides insight into human motivation, the understanding he gleaned as an adult who had processed his childhood and transformed it into art, imagining a perspective lost on him as a child. He also credits her with intro-

ducing him to African-American history through the stories of her own previous life in the South and through family stories as well as through characters from folktales. This early introduction was the platform from which he launched into his studies of African-American history in earnest during his days working for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) (1936–40). Throughout his career some of the most memorable poems he created were based on his continued exploration of African-American figures and history: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” and “Runagate, Runagate,” to name only three. As a black poet in the 1930s and as a child of a Detroit slum, Hayden aspired to leave the world of his youth and was blessed with a strong mind, a facile imagination, and good fortune. Hayden encountered minor miracles throughout his life. Being hired in 1936 by the Federal Writers’ Project was one. But as early as his elementary school years, Hayden’s passion for words drew attention and help. For example, he was lucky in the notice a public librarian took of the nearsighted boy who was so interested in books. According to Hayden, she would save books of poetry for him, and as he began writing himself, publishing in the local church and community newsletters and such, she would display his work. Added to that encouragement, a social worker observing his carrying books of poetry (one by Countee Cullen) as he stood in line for assistance talked to him about them. He told her that one day he would write a book. A few days later she showed up with information about a contact that might help him get into college. He made the contact and thus attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State). Throughout Hayden’s life, in fact, it seems that these “angels” appeared at critical junctures, unbidden. His fi rst book Heart-shape in the Dust (1940) was published in a similar way. Another important intervention in his life occurred when he became a Ba’hai in the 1940s (for more information on this religion, consult www.bahai.org). His commitment to the precepts of his faith defi ned his worldview. Hayden also achieved one of his greatest honors— winning the Grand Prix de la Poésie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966—through a kind of intervention. He had

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not himself submitted his work for consideration. Rosey Poole, a scholar of African-American poetry residing in Great Britain, had been aware of his work and called it to the attention of a friend and colleague, Paul Breman, who published A Ballad of Remembrance in 1962. Dr. Poole intervened again when she realized that this work was not in the preliminary list. With help from Langston Hughes (another committee member), Hayden’s work was included. Yet each of these miracles, as it were, was accompanied by strife and difficulty. Although a librarian helped and encouraged him, he had to transfer to a special school for his early high school career because of his worsening eyesight. Yet in his senior year, he transferred again and ended his high school career with a poem in the school arts publication. His year of graduation, however, was 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression. There was no money for him to attend college, so he worked at whatever he could during the day and took night classes with William Hayden’s permission. That preceded his attendance at Detroit College. The most dramatic contrast occurred in 1966, however. In the same year that he won the Grand Prix, he was publicly attacked as an “Uncle Tom” and “accommodationist” at the First Black Writers Conference held at Fisk University, where he had been teaching and nurturing aspiring writers for over 20 years. Black artists asserting the necessity of using the arts as a platform for furthering the cause of social justice were exasperated by Hayden’s refusal to subordinate craft, from his point of view, to politics. But this attack—public and led by some colleagues and students—was as traumatic for him as winning the Grand Prix was exhilarating. In the last decade of his life, however, his efforts and achievements seem to have coalesced. He published three books of poetry in the 1970s—Words in the Mourning Time (1970), The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), and American Journal (1978). He was also elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Poets in 1975, finally appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1976–77—the first African American to be appointed to that position—and reappointed in 1977–78. Hayden also became a full professor at the University of Michigan and received

several honorary doctorates, among them one at Brown University. Yet his health began to fail toward the latter half of the decade. Diagnosed with cancer by 1978, he had begun “to get his papers in order,” though he was still accepting speaking engagements and hard at work on new poems. The University of Michigan and the Ba’hai community of Ann Arbor collaborated to honor him at “A Tribute to Robert Hayden,” the event he missed because of a bout of influenza. Still, what people remembered on hearing of his death the following day were the wit and charm with which he entertained his guests the evening before. Hayden’s was a life distinguished by his devotion to art, specifically to poetry. By some standards his output is quite small—often the new poems in a volume numbered as few as 12 or 13. He published three volumes he later considered to be his “apprentice works,” Heart-shape in the Dust, The Lion and the Archer, and Figure in Time. And though he continued publishing, mostly overseas, he took 27 years to place his work with a major American publisher. Throughout that time, however, his notebooks, papers, and, indeed, prior published versions of his work show the meticulousness he lavished on crafting his poetry. There are many revisions, sometimes quite subtle and other times more extensive. His biographers provide an index and insight into these changes. In the end, however, it is this dedication to craftsmanship that marks his work as distinctive and that rewards the careful reader’s full attention.

“Frederick Douglass” (1946) “Frederick Douglass” is a sonnet that ends Hayden’s collection entitled A Ballad of Remembrance (1962). It is part of a suite of poems focused on AfricanAmerican history: “A Middle Passage,” “O Daedalus, Fly Away Home,” “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” and “Runagate, Runagate.” The language is simple and direct, conversational yet lyrical. Some of the music of the poem results from his judicious use of repetition. For example, he repeats “this man . . . this former slave, this Negro.” And at the end of his

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catalog, he says again, “this man.” Each repetition lends emphasis and actually builds momentum. The simplicity of the language also adds to its musical effect. The lines “this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth” include no difficult words, no elaborate metaphors. Hayden makes his point about the fundamental or essential quality of freedom through his simple words and the two basic elements to which he compares freedom—earth and air. He tells us that everyone must have freedom to live. It should not be, in his estimation, something awarded only the lucky few, who have earned it or can afford it. It should be like the air we breathe or the earth we walk on and use. Likewise the language of the poem is accessible to nearly everyone. The only two words perhaps not immediately recognizable are diastole and systole. Yet they describe the routine action of the heart muscle at work—expanding and contracting. So they extend the point he is making about freedom’s becoming as “instinctual” as the working of the body, not something to decide about or think about, something that just is. By his equation, if one is human, one is free. Noteworthy, too, is the way he compresses Frederick Douglass’s life into these lines: this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world where none is lonely, none hunted, alien, this man, superb in love and logic, this man shall be remembered.

Hayden captures the essential qualities of Douglass’s life in these phrases. He uses his situation as a former slave to call for the abolition of slavery. Douglass, the poem says, was no mere “do-gooder”: He had experienced some of the harshest realities of slave life, captured in the phrase “this Negro, beaten to his knees.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the poem, and then look at its parts. Use the punctuation to help you with your reading, espe-

cially the colon, semicolons, and periods. Using these marks to point the way, what seem to be the major divisions or ideas of the poem? How do they relate to each other? 2. Hayden’s use of sonnet form in “Frederick Douglass” has been compared to the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins. After reading and considering “Frederick Douglass” as a poem in its own right, select one of Hopkins’s sonnets (“Pied Beauty” or “God’s Grandeur,” for example) and try to find evidence of Hopkins’s influence on Hayden’s work.

“Homage to the Empress of the Blues” (1962)

“Homage to the Empress of the Blues” first appeared in what Hayden later called one of his “apprentice works,” The Lion and the Archer, a publication he collaborated on with Myron O’Higgins. He published six poems in that collection—one of them “Homage.” Although the poem appears in almost every subsequent collection of Hayden’s poetry, only the phrasing of the sixth line changes from “flashed her golden teeth and sang” to “flashed her golden smile and sang.” This one change, however, is an illustration of Hayden’s tinkering and searching for the exact word and image over the years. The smile represents the wonderful generosity of her art and its beauty. The poem pays tribute to Bessie Smith, one of the most famous blues women. He captures her grace and bravado. Her yards of pearls, her satin and ostrich feathers, make a statement that defies the “riot-squad of statistics” about poor and working-class black women. Her elegance and poise despite the fact that she is singing “my man-done-me-wrong” songs counter the images those statistics present of black life. She cheers her audience with her golden smile and her stage presence, offering them a kind of model of “grace under pressure.” Hayden called the poems from his early publishing period “baroque,” and if the diction of this poem is compared to that of “Frederick Douglass,” the differences are clear. For example, the

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poem opens with the description of a man who is “gracile,” not a word in vernacular vocabulary. According to the dictionary, however, it means “of slender build in a charming or attractive way.” So, while Hayden’s use of this word shows a fondness for unusual words, it also shows his persistence in searching out words that carry exact meaning. Gracile seems perfectly to capture the type of man “dangerous as a jaguar” to women—beautiful, sleek, and predatory. Likewise, he uses the word laths later in the poem; a lath is a thin flat strip of wood, especially one of a series forming the foundation for the plaster of a wall or the tiles of a roof. Note that in the poem, these foundation strips are beginning to show through, highlighting the economic predicament of people who live in fear of those “statistics” used to devalue them. They fear “alarming fists of snow,” which suggest government intervention or interference from members of the dominant society. In other words, these folks are guilty of being black and poor and so, perhaps judged as “shiftless and lazy.” Thus, despite the unfamiliarity of Hayden’s word choices, they are considered choices. They each help emphasize the setting for the Empress’s performance and the community’s need for a presence like hers. Robert Hayden pays homage to this empress because she not only sings the blues, turning anguish into art, but offers them as a live demonstration of how to transform life’s indignities—its poverty and pain—into beauty.

“Middle Passage” (1962) “Middle Passage” illustrates Robert Hayden’s many poetic skills: his ability to craft a whole from many parts and effectively introduce many voices. It also employs his full narrative, dramatic, and lyrical abilities. Hayden began his research in 1941, shortly after completing his work as a writer for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), conducting much of it at the Schomburg Collection in New York. According to Pontheolla Williams, one of his biographers, four versions of this poem were published from 1941 to 1966, testifying to Hayden’s commitment to craftsmanship (Williams 81–82). “Middle Passage” provides multiple perspectives on the transatlantic slave trade, ending with the story of the Amistad revolt. In shaping the poem, Hayden labors to educate his readers—heart, mind, and soul—about the complex human perils and realities this story illustrates. He establishes mood and setting from the poem’s opening gambit, a list of names of slave ships: “Jesus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy.” As names with religious associations, they are ironic; they also call attention to the fact that several European countries, Spain and Portugal, among others, are deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade. The additional ships’ names later in the poem—“Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Anne,” are notably English this time. They help establish the ironic tone of the poem and situate the narrative in the context of actual history. After this opening, the first voice is heard—an observer/poet/speaker’s voice setting the scene:

For Discussion or Writing 1. This poem is structured with two “because” sections, each followed by a description of the woman singer. Look closely at each of these sections. What information does each contain? Then look at the sections that describe the singer. How does each description relate to the section it follows? 2. This homage is to a known blues singer, Bessie Smith. There are pictures of her, especially one frequently used for postcards, and so on. Find a picture and read some about her life, especially her life as a performer. Reread the poem after completing this research. What does that add to your reading and interpretation?

Sails flashing to the wind like weapons, sharks following the moans the fever and the dying; horror the corposant and compass rose. Middle Passage: voyage through death to life upon these shores.

Readers are, thus, immediately plunged into the darkness and death of the slave ships. Hayden also works throughout the poem to establish the complexities and tensions that surround this

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venture from fi rst to last without submerging us in sentiment. The strategy he uses most often here is to withhold focusing on the turmoil of the humans in the hold, focusing instead on that of the members of the crew. He evokes the “horror” of the slave ships almost entirely from the vantage point of the captain and crew rather than that of the enslaved Africans. We see and hear the mounting terror of crew members—fear of disease, of rebellion, of the hatred that cannot be “stared down.” The fi rst direct experience readers vicariously participate in is provided through a ship’s log entry dated “10 April 1800.” In this section the writer describes the “terrifying sickness” that has “scratched sight from the Capt.’s eyes” and threatens the rest of the crew. So vivid is this description that the plight of the captives below decks is temporarily held at bay. This strategy, however, makes the point that participating in trading in human life has hellish consequences for everyone. Hayden also supplies important information to help readers understand the magnitude of this trade. For example, he articulates its major motivation: “black gold, black ivory, black seed.” Trade in human cargo (African cargo, in this case) was a very lucrative enterprise at every point. Even at the point of purchase, it was a “good” business investment if done wisely and well because it could enable the owner to produce “homegrown” captives—those born into captivity. Then the owner, himself, could sell these people to earn a profit as well as to recoup his original investment. Still the reader grows increasingly aware of the cost—physical, mental, moral—of such business practices. Hayden communicates these difficult and distasteful realities through the language and structure of the poem. One means by which he conveys the complex layers of this story is through his poet persona. Using this voice, he comments on the import or meaning of the details and events the poem communicates, such as in this refrain, a rewording of Ariel’s song in the fi rst act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones New England pews are made, those were altar lights that were his eyes.

These lines underscore the ironic ways in which Christianity is used in the service of enslaving other humans. Later in the poem, the voice states: Shuttles in the rocking loom of history, the dark ships move, the dark ships move, their bright ironical names like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth.

In this commentary we hear a tinge of bitterness and anger. But Hayden is careful to use this device sparingly. His aims are larger than simple protest; he aims to render a complex view of the many perspectives involved in this dark historical moment. Thus the structure of the poem operates as a camera with multiple lenses—drawing readers into individual perspectives then pulling back to provide a wider view. Returning for a moment to the previously discussed ship’s log entry, readers can appreciate how this works. This entry provides a wider view: 10 April 1800— Blacks rebellious. Crew uneasy. Our linguist says their moaning is a prayer for death, ours and their own.

Through this quote, Hayden establishes certain “facts,” for instance, that rebelliousness and the longing for death of the enslaved were often conditions aboard slave ships. He uses words from the ship’s log to do so. Hayden thereby counters arguments from his own times that the conditions in which Africans were enslaved were mostly humane and that they were, if not content, at least docile and subservient. Thus he accomplishes another pedagogical goal. He uses other narrative devices as well to tell the many stories intertwined here, such as the segments he offers from legal depositions. One of these, for example, provides the narrative of The Bella Rose. Through this segment, readers meet one of the two black individuals whose stories are offered here. This one is the story of a woman, named by the crew “the Guinea Rose.” It brings to life the conditions young women often suffered aboard these ships, ending, in this case, with fiery death, a mad captain, and the anonymous agony of the African men who remained

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chained below deck. Yet Hayden limits the focus of this segment to that of the men “who fought to lie with her,” instead of her emotions and reactions. The story is all the more arresting because it is told in such a dispassionate voice. Hayden also draws on the power of first person; moreover, he uses it to complicate the reader’s view. His first-person narrator is a man who has been a crew member on a slave ship for 20 years or more. The source for the disturbing historical details of African collusion and reciprocal greed in this tale of horror, the sailor tells the story of a chief derisively named King Anthracite by white slavers. This chief captures members of other tribes, murdering the old and sick and sending the young off to their horrific fate for “trinkets.” The lust for riches has driven both the sailor and the African chief into perpetrating these crimes, both men succumbing to this particularly virulent “tropical fever.” It is ultimately a very destructive one, eventually ending, in the case of the sailor/narrator, with the “melting [of] his bones.” The narrative sections of Hayden’s poem are woven together with bits of hymns and prayers that further underscore the ironies of the material presented. For example, “Jesus Savior Pilot Me / Over Life’s Tempestuous Sea” functions on multiple levels. Certainly whoever finds himself or herself on a slave ship, as an enslaved man or woman, one of the enslavers, or an “innocent bystander,” needs spiritual and psychological guidance. And if the person offering up such a prayer is really one of the slavers, he needs more guidance than the words seem to request. In Hayden’s view, that person is “lost” ethically and morally. Someone literally lost on the tempestuous seas of the Atlantic Ocean might also offer these lines. Hayden’s language suggests all these possibilities simultaneously. Finally, however, the poem arrives at its dramatic conclusion—the tale of the Amistad revolt. Hayden has once again made a surprising choice. Instead of using the point of view of the hero—Cinquez— Hayden tells the story in the righteously indignant voice of a Spanish officer, one of the two white survivors of the revolt. Hayden explains the horror of the revolt from the view of the white men slaughtered. The officer expresses outraged disbelief that

not only might such behavior be unpunished, but that Cinquez and his colleagues are being treated in any quarters as possible heroes. But at the end, the poet persona interjects: “The deep immortal human wish, the timeless will . . . ,” arguing that the revolt expresses a deep-seated, desperate universal longing for freedom. Hayden has created a complex, layered, multivoiced poem. He allows us to experience the horrors of the Middle Passage from a variety of angles, showing readers its corrupting influence on all of its participants. Ending with “Voyage through death to life upon these shores,” he leaves us contemplating the quality of life all slavery’s survivors will encounter.

For Discussion or Writing 1. This poem is a complex weaving of many threads. Try to follow just one of them, for example, just the sections with “Jesus Savior” throughout part 1 or just the italicized passages in parts 1 and 2. By looking at just one thread, what can you understand about what it is trying to say and why Hayden has woven it into the poem? 2. Select one of the stories from the poem. Who is telling the story? To whom? Why? How does that particular story fit in with the poem overall? 3. Both T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” are said to have influenced “Middle Passage.” Choose one of these works and compare and contrast it with “Middle Passage.” Be careful to consider theme, language, structure, and tone, among other aspects.

“Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sundays” (1962) “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sundays” is part of a set of seven poems in A Ballad of Remembrance that people the landscape of Paradise Alley—where Robert Hayden grew up. In American Journal, his last published work, he includes an eight-part poem formally titled “Elegies for Paradise Alley,” which provides more specific portraits, but in these poems he begins chronicling the people and experiences he encountered there.

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This poem mourns the death of a woman recognized in her community for the beauty of her singing, especially her church singing, on which her neighbors have depended. The manner of her death, gunshot wounds, stuns and saddens them, linking her death to something “Satan sweet-talked” her into doing. They mourn not only her passing but also because the way she died may bar her from heaven. Although the poem tends toward narrative, we get only a slice of the story. We never know who the woman is exactly, only that she sang so beautifully, so powerfully, that she was considered God’s “fancy warbler.” The speaker asks, “Who’s going to make old hardened sinner men tremble now? . . . Who will sing Jesus down . . . ?” Clearly this is a loss felt by the whole community. This woman’s singing helped them in their “struggling along and doing without and being colored / all through blue Monday.” Who will take her place now? Where will they turn for that help now? Those questions are unanswered. Thus the poem comments, through the way it mourns the loss of this artist, the way art can function in people’s lives. Its structure also imitates song, like a blues ballad while not strictly adhering to the blues form. The singer died on one of those “blue Mondays.” It also uses repetition in similar ways, as in the line “Who would have thought she’d end this way?” repeated at the end of each alternating stanza. And, as the blues does, it turns mourning into song. Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird His fancy warbler; Satan sweet-talked her, four bullets hushed her. Who would have thought she’d end that way?

The irony of the woman’s situation mimics the irony often found in blues lyrics as well. Although her art was powerful enough to lift her community toward the heavens, it fails her in the end. Whatever transcendence her Sunday singing created did not sustain her through her own troubled time in the weekday world.

More irony arises from the description of her lying in her coffin, looking so natural (as the phrase goes) “among the Broken Hearts and Gates Ajar” that are the symbols of death in this Christian community— the hearts representing the loved ones left behind as the deceased journeys into heaven through the open gates. But whether or not she will be permitted entry is in question in the poem. Thus the poem ends in lamentation—“Who would have thought, / who would have thought she’d end that way?” Unanswered, this final question hangs in the air.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What is the story that unfolds in this poem? What narrative details are missing? If you were investigating this for a news story, what would you try to find out besides what the poem reveals, as you interviewed the neighbors and church members? (Try to write that story.) 2. What do you notice about how Hayden has structured this poem—for example, how, when, and why does he use repetition? How does his technique affect how you respond to the story?

“Runagate, Runagate” (1962) “Runagate, Runagate” is the fourth in the series of poems that end A Ballad of Remembrance focused on some aspect of the black experience of slavery. This is a two-part, multivoiced poem evoking the terror and trouble of those who ran away; part 1 focuses on the escape of anonymous persons while part 2 focuses on the heroics of Harriet Tubman, one of the most famous escapees. As “Middle Passage” does, “Runagate, Runagate” achieves some of its effectiveness through Hayden’s interspersing of actual quotes (this time from newspaper ads for runaways) with the voices of the runaways themselves as well as that of the speaker/observer. The poem opens with the perspective of the runaway and the observer at the same time. The language of that opening recreates the runaway’s perceptions: Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness

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and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing and the night cold and the night long and the river to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning and blackness ahead and when shall I reach that somewhere morning and keep going and never turn back and keep going

The lack of punctuation creates a stream of consciousness perception of the mental state and emotional condition as well as the physical breathlessness of the pursued. While the perspective is that of the frightened runner (“the night cold and the night long and the river to cross”), the language is that of the speaker/poet (“darkness thicketed with shapes of terror”). Hayden effectively combines them to set the scene and establish the emotional pitch of the poem. Hayden employs a number of poetic devices in this poem. Notably he introduces rhythm and emphasizes meaning through his use of another kind of repetition, as in the following: Hoot-owl calling in the ghosted air, five times calling in the ghosted air. Shadow of a face in the scary leaves, shadow of a voice in the talking leaves.

The repeated words add music while creating a kind of haunting echo that seems fitting for this scene, ghostly and unnerving. Yet the details (for example, the hoot-owl calling five times) are culled directly from Hayden’s research into accounts of slave escapes. He weaves the poem together using narrative fragments, devices like repeating words (“Runagate / Runagate / Runagate”) and using lines from spirituals (“And before I’d be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave”), along with the quotes from the advertising sources. The narrative fragments create immediacy and build dramatic tension. In part 1, for example, the opening scene could be any runaway’s story, but

it seems specific, immediately involving us as readers and as runners ourselves. In part 2 we get an eyewitness account of someone traveling with Harriet Tubman, which provides a complex view of her courage and determination, echoed in and underscored by the last words of the poem: “Mean mean mean to be free.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. This is one of Hayden’s poems with several voices and different sources. Identify at least three of these specifically—that is, who is speaking? Or where is this segment quoted? Then discuss why it is used in the poem at a particular place. For example, “And before I’ll be a slave / I’ll be buried in my grave” is a segment from a Negro spiritual that ends “and go home to my Lord and be free.” It is often quoted in stories of escape and resistance. In this poem, it seems to be the voice of those running away from enslavement toward freedom, expressing their desperate desire to be free. 2. Look at parts 1 and 2 of this poem. What is the focus of each? How are they connected? 3. How does the poem capture the personality or character of Harriet Tubman? Are you surprised by the way she is depicted here? Why or why not?

“Summertime and the Living . . .” (1962) Robert Hayden crafts this poem in contrast to the well-known song from the musical Porgy and Bess. In the original, the phrase is “Summertime and the living is easy.” It is a song that offers up a vision of black life, even for poor blacks, that is a romantic illusion, full of good food, love, laughter—all to be had for the asking. In the course of the musical (and the DuBose Heyward book on which the musical is based), bad things do happen, love is thwarted, and “living” is seen to be more complicated than the song allows. The version of poor black life offered from an outsider’s perspective misses some critical observations. Hayden’s poem is a corrective. Hayden first published this poem in one of his “apprentice works,” Figure of Time. Looking at the

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changes he made, changing the line breaks, the stanza breaks, and a word here or there, provides insight into his effort as craftsman. For example, in the original: Nobody planted roses, he recalls, but sunflowers gangled there sometimes, tough-stalked and bold and like the vivid children there unplanned. There circus-poster horses curveted in trees-of-heaven above the quarrels and shattered glass and he was daredevil rider of them all.

As it exists in the more widely distributed later version, these two verses are one verse; he changes daredevil to bareback. But notice the difference the changes in line breaks make: Nobody planted roses, he recalls, but sunflowers gangled there sometimes, tough-stalked and bold And like the vivid children there unplanned. There circus-poster horses curveted in trees of heaven above the quarrels and shattered glass, and he was bareback rider of them all.

The flower imagery—the roses and the sunflowers—provides symbols of economic status. The roses are equated with “dearness” both economic and emotional—requiring the luxuries of time and resources to plant and nurture them. Thus they are available to community members only in death: No roses there in summer— Oh, never roses except when people died—

The sunflowers, on the other hand, grew unbidden, unplanned, like the children who grew there— “tough-stalked and bold.” Hayden has employed this symbol in other poems, notably in “Sunflowers, Beaubien Street,” from his fi rst publication, Heartshape in the Dust. Again, the distinctive qualities

include the ability to grow and even prosper in unlikely soil, uncultivated—yet be both beautiful and strong if not highly valued. In fact, a major theme of this poem is the undervaluing of the lives of the occupants of this community. If the children grow and develop largely unattended, it is because the difficulties of living have so stripped the adults, both emotionally and physically. no vacations for his elders, so harshened after each unrelenting day that they were shouting-angry.

Yet the members of this community retain their dreams, embodied in Jack Johnson and his diamond limousine and in their “fantasies of Ethiopia spreading her gorgeous wings.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. This poem recalls the summertimes of Hayden’s childhood. What is the tone of those recollections—happy? sad? angry? bewildered? amused? Or some other set of emotions? Or some mix of emotions? What are the details that support your evaluation? 2. This poem uses the title of a famous song from the opera Porgy and Bess. Find out about the opera and find the lyrics to the song “Summertime” itself. Compare and contrast Hayden’s “Summertime” to the one in the song.

“Those Winter Sundays” (1962) “Those Winter Sundays” is an often-anthologized Hayden poem. It offers a portrait of a boy’s perception of his father, which seems to be based on Hayden’s own boyhood. He captures both the attitude of the boy and the adult looking back at his behavior. The first verse sets the Sunday morning scene, brittle with cold, as the father rises to warm the house for his family. The details are significant—the cold is “blueblack,” the father’s hands cracked and aching. But he is silent—no complaint, no comment. Yet, “No one ever thanked him.”

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In the second verse Hayden develops the scene with more sensory impressions. This time, the speaker can “hear the cold splintering, breaking.” He points out that his father called for everyone to get up only after “the rooms were warm.” But he explains his own slow response, “fearing the chronic angers of that house.” The speaker here struggles to sort out his feelings as he remembers those days. His father was apparently a good man, responsible and willing to work hard, with cracked and aching hands to provide a physically warm place for his family. But what about these “chronic angers?” That takes us as readers to a line from another poem in this collection. In “Summertime and the Living . . . ,” just two poems earlier, Hayden has described “elders, so harshened after each unrelenting day / that they were shouting-angry,” one way to account for the “chronic angers.” Then again in the very next poem, “The Whipping,” the speaker describes a woman whipping her son until “[she] leans muttering against / a tree, exhausted, purged— / avenged in part for lifelong hidings / she has had to bear.” All three of these poems include this recurring imagery of violence perpetrated on the young as vengeance for the violence life has perpetrated on these adults. So readers’ sympathy is quickened for the boy described in the poem. But in the final verse, Hayden undercuts our nearly stereotypical and easy sympathy: Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

In these few lines, he captures the self-centeredness of youth and the pathos of both adult and child locked in miscommunication. Polishing his son’s shoes goes beyond the expectation of “manhood,” in providing warmth for the family. It is arguably a tender gesture. The father can offer only these tender acts against his “chronic angers.” Yet the boy is indifferent to the father’s acts of tenderness. Neither seems to understand the other.

So the poem ends hauntingly, repeating, as if the speaker himself not only regretful but slightly bewildered and chagrined by the insensitivity of youth. He repeats his question, “what did I know, what did I know . . . ?” And we, too, are challenged to ask ourselves what signs we have been missing. What acts of love have we failed to see?

For Discussion or Writing 1. Hayden starts this poem in the middle— “Sundays, too. . . .” Why? What does that reveal about the character of the father and the life this family lives? 2. What is the overall emotional tone of this poem? What details lead you to that conclusion? How do words like indifference, chronic angers, and austere contribute to that tone? Why?

“Tour 5” (1962) “Tour 5” is placed directly after the title poem, “A Ballad of Remembrance,” which is set in New Orleans during Mardi Gras and recounts Hayden’s earliest confrontations with race in the complicated social structure of that southern city. In “Tour 5,” however, a seemingly simple incident, stopping at a small town gas station to fill up the tank, becomes another occasion for confronting racial hatred. The man who serves them is “a rawboned man / whose eyes revile us as the enemy.” This hatred is underscored by the beauty of the day on a drive that “winds down through autumn hills / in blazonry of farewell scarlet / and recessional gold.” The physical beauties aside, though, the landscape already reveals past violence; the villages he and his companion pass with names like Choctaw and Chickasaw “are all that’s left” of these cultures. Readers are forced to contemplate the reasons for the disappearance of these Native Americans. They must also ask who occupies this beautiful land now. One answer appears in the next verse, images of both the “rawboned man” and “Confederate sentinels” who guard these towns. But whom are they guarding against? What are the guardians protecting or preventing? Hayden never directly addresses these

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questions. Instead he turns the reader’s attention to the speaker’s reaction as the journey continues. Shrill gorgon silence breathes behind his taut civility and in the ever-tautening air, dark for us despite its Indian summer glow. We drive on, following the route of highwaymen and phantoms.

Hayden articulates the growing sense of dread as well as his sense of shock at being hated so impersonally yet so immediately. The very air seems poisoned by this hatred; violence seems barely restrained. The line “dark for us despite its Indian summer glow” also suggests a certain sadness that such ugliness exists to mar what should be a simple loveliness. So the poem drives on to its conclusion—invoking slavery and the bloody Civil War. Hayden also calls our attention to the continued marks of that racism—the poverty of “the kindling porches” despite the children who wave to him and his companion from that vantage point. The whole incident has left a bad taste in the speaker’s mouth, recalling as it does the blood and anguish ironically underscored by the lushness of the landscape—“its brightness harsh as bloodstained swords.” Ultimately, it is not a protest poem, rather one marked by bewilderment and sadness. It contrasts the gloriousness of the natural world with the ways humans disfigure that loveliness through their hatreds. It is a poem that leaves the reader, like the poet, wondering, “Why?”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Locate the route Hayden traces in “Tour 5.” He begins in the South (Georgia). What towns might he have traveled through? Explore the history of the Choctaw and Chickasaw relative to this trail. How does this information help you understand the poem? 2. Hayden paints a picture of his physical surroundings using specific words. Think about the following ones carefully. Why blazonry? Why recessional? Why gorgon? Why flayed? Find out the definitions of these words and discuss their connotations as well. Notice where they are used in the poem.

“The Night-Blooming Cereus” (1972) The title poem from Hayden’s 1972 collection includes seven new poems, meditations on the mysterious connections between art and life. For example, “Richard Hunt’s ‘Arachne’” focuses on the moment of Arachne’s transformation from human to spider—caught in Hunt’s sculpture. The description of Arachne’s change might easily be applied to the work of any artist—“godly vivisection, husking her / gutting her, cutting hubris its fat and bones away.” Good art, the reader may assume, attempts that type of change. In addition, “The Peacock Room” contemplates: “Ars Longa Which is crueler Vita Brevis life or art?”

That poem sketches the confl ict of two men—artist and benefactor—pitted against each other in the creation of this artwork. It presents the irony that the creation has outlived the creators and the conflict itself. The poem ends by identifying art as a “portal” to the even greater mystery of life’s meaning. As part of these meditations, the title poem of the collection focuses on the mystery of creative energy and purpose. The poet and his wife await the blooming of the cereus, which blooms only one night. The poet’s attention is directed to the powerful life force of this plant: the mystery of its blossoming, the purpose and source of its alluring scent, not intended for humans. What is the key to its mysterious timing? The cereus seems to respond solely to some deep calling of its own, a response like that of an artist. The speaker is forcefully attracted to, yet repelled by, “the heavy bud . . . on its neck-like tube.” He charts his reactions—a mix of wonderment, uneasiness, and near-dread captured in his description of it as a “snake, eyeless bird-head, beak that would gape with grotesque life-squawk,” a birth image. One assumes art, too, in its initial phase is sometimes awkward, perhaps even off-putting. Hayden’s description of the plant’s preparatory phase, “impelled by stirrings within itself,” again evokes comparison to the workings of creativity—alien to some, even slightly disturbing.

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Yet not everyone is affected in this way, even by the initial phases of art or life. The speaker notes the difference between his own reaction and that of his wife, who waits with him: But you, my dear, conceded less to the bizarre than to the imminence of bloom. . . .

He waits in mild apprehension, she in anticipation. Once the perfume announces that the cereus has bloomed, however, both “dropped trivial tasks and marveling beheld at last the achieved flower.” Yet, in the midst of their celebration, they were aware that the opening of the bloom also signaled its dying. Lunar presence, foredoomed, already dying, it charged the room with plangency older than human cries, ancient as prayer. . . .

So the poem confronts the mystery of all life—all creation dies. Yet this moment is preserved in art. Perhaps one purpose of art, then, as the poems in this collection suggest, is to challenge the brevity, the impermanence of life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. This poem describes waiting for the blooming of this specific plant. Find out what you can about the plant. How does Hayden’s poem convey that information? What does the poem talk about beyond that? Examples? 2. Notice the difference between the ways the two people in the poem await the blooming of this plant. Why do you think Hayden calls the reader’s attention to this difference? 3. Hayden seems to pay close attention to flowers and other natural phenomena. Select one of his other poems that also uses imagery from the plant world to compare and/or contrast the way he uses the cereus in this poem.

“Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers” (1975) Published in Angle of Ascent, “Free Fantasia” memorializes another African-American figure whose identity and significance had been overlooked and lost within the dominant culture. Tiger Flowers was an African-American middleweight boxing champion in the mid-1920s, who was very successful but died young (32). Flowers is significant because of what he represents, a time of great optimism and excitement for many Americans but particularly for the many African Americans who migrated to major cities in the North. The Harlem Renaissance was at its height in New York with counterparts in Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. The sense that the race was “on the move” was heightened by the successes of figures like Flowers, whose triumphs and sumptuous style of living were the news of the day. Hayden uses Flowers’s life and early death to communicate that shared hope, excitement, and eventual disappointment. First, he evokes for us the excitement and optimism of his childhood spent partially in his “secret” work for the prostitutes of Paradise Alley—otherwise seen as the slum of his youth. He captures the sense of being drawn to and touching the forbidden. (His strict father, who disapproved of even the jazz and blues of the day, was totally unaware of the young Hayden’s adventures.) He runs errands for the larger-than-life, exotic figures Stack-o-Diamonds, Eula Mae, and Miss Jackie. Demonstrating his poetic exactitude, he calls these women “Dixie odalisques.” An odalisque is a woman at the bottom of the social pool in a harem. She is the servant to women who are concubines but may, if talented or beautiful enough, someday rise to become a concubine herself. That is the actual status of these women in the larger context of the American scene. The fantasia of the title is exact as well. Each person is caught up in fantasy—the child persona who “thought such gaiety could not die,” the women “speeding through cutglass dark to see the macho angel,” and the whole African-American community who through their fantasies indulge in Flowers’s successes and luxurious life, part of their dreams for themselves—beautiful, exciting,

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and just beyond reach. “Fantasia” captures the mood of the times, each participant locked in a dream speeding headlong toward its conclusion. The end of the poem moves from the fleeting “dream” to longer-lasting art. Rousseau’s The Virgin Forest is the poet’s choice as an elegy for Flowers, conjuring the innocence of the age in which people indulge naively in exoticizing the past, and the lives of others. It seems a good fit: “the dark figure” in the painting is only a shadow—no details about the man himself are clear, overshadowed by his colorful surroundings. Thus the poem is a mural providing readers with an evocative, colorful scene that draws us into this fantasy and invites us to contemplate its meaning.

For Discussion or Writing 1. By explicitly alluding to an artistic creation from a different medium, Henri Rousseau’s The Virgin Forest, and declaring that it is an elegy for Tiger Flowers, Hayden incorporates the painting, making it an integral and essential part of the poem. Find an image at an online site such as and write a well-developed essay that explores the relationship between Rousseau’s creation and Hayden’s poem. Use informational Web sites such as http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/ nge/Article.jsp?id=h-870 to investigate the life of the boxer whose nickname was Tiger Flowers and incorporate this information in your comparative analysis. 2. “The great migration,” which took place in the fi rst half of the 20th century, was a major event in the history of African Americans. Between 1916 and 1930, nearly 1.5 million African Americans moved from smaller cities in the southern United States to large, urban centers of industry in the North, seeking jobs and refuge from institutionalized racism. Using trustworthy online sources such as the New York Public Library’s In Motion Web site (http://www.inmotionaame.org/ migrations/landing.cfm?migration=8), write a well-developed essay that discusses how Hayden’s poem about the “elegant avenger” captures or fails to capture the plight, hopes, or disappoint-

ment of African Americans trying to start new lives in the North.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON HAYDEN AND HIS WORK 1. Examine Hayden’s statements on being a black poet (notably from the Counterpoise 3 introduction of 1948 as quoted in Collected Prose: Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick Glaysher). (a) Compare his ideas to those of Langston Hughes as expressed in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which can be found at http://www.thenation.com/ doc/19260623/hughes, or Ron Karenga’s “On Black Art,” which can be found at http://www.africawithin.com/karenga/ on_black_art.htm. Note both the similarities and the differences among these statements. Which seems to be most critical? Why? (b) Find two specific poems, one by Hayden and one by another black poet, to illustrate one critical point from each argument. 2. In Hayden’s “Kodachromes of the Island,” found in Words in the Mourning Time, the speaker/ poet says: I roamed the cobbled island, and thought of Yeats, his passionate search for a theme. Sought mine. (stanza 3, lines 8–12, as quoted in Williams 25)

Research one of Yeats’s important themes in his poetry. Compare that with one you discover in Hayden’s work. 3. Hayden creates portraits of both historical figures and “ordinary” souls through his poetry. These poems sometimes reveal complex characters. Look especially at “The Whipping” and “Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves.” What do these poems reveal about the characters they

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portray? Do your feelings toward the characters portrayed remain the same after reading the poem two or three times, or do they change? What elements of the poems themselves affect either reaction? Examine closely two poems in which Hayden focuses on one of the visual arts—“Monet’s ‘Waterlilies’” or Richard Hunt’s “Arachne.” Look at the artwork he uses then consider what his poem using that work is saying. Next compare and contrast his use of these artworks (for example, thematically or technically). “The Peacock Room” is a meditation on art, life, and the world. Read Hayden’s work first, research the history of the room itself, then reread the poem. How does the poem change for you after completing your research? Select one of the following—The Night-blooming Cereus or Angle of Ascent. Read the whole work and think about how Hayden has put that particular collection together. Choose two or three poems from the collection that seem to “speak to” each other. Discuss them in that light. Words in the Mourning Time was originally published in 1970. Research the times (the late 1960s) immediately prior to its publication date. Discuss one of the poems in this collection that seems to respond to something you uncover in your research. In A Ballad of Remembrance, the collection ends with several poems that address moments in black history. These are “Middle Passage,” “O Daedulus, Fly Away Home,” “The Ballad of Nat Turner,” “Runagate, Runagate,” and “Frederick Douglass.” Select any one of these and examine the historical events connected with the poem. After completing the research, return to the poem. How has your reading of it changed? How does reading one of the black history poems listed change when it is considered as part of a group of poems about slavery and black history? Hayden has two complete groupings of poems that are responses to specific places: One is the section entitled An Inference of Mexico

from A Ballad of Remembrance; the second is entitled Elegies for Paradise Alley in American Journal. Choose one of these groupings and discuss how he uses place in these poems. For example, what descriptions of place can you fi nd? Then how do the details of place help the reader understand the characters he presents in those places? WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES American Poets since World War II. Vol. 2, Dictionary of Literary Biography. Edited by Donald J. Greiner. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. Fetrow, Fred M. Robert Hayden. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Glaysher, Frederick, ed. Collected Poems: Robert Hayden. New York: Livewright, 1985. ———. Collected Prose: Robert Hayden. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Goldstein, Laurence, and Robert Chrisman, eds. Robert Hayden: Essays on Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Harper, Michael S., and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art and Scholarship. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Hatcher, John. The Life and Poetry of Robert Hayden. Oxford: George Ronald, 1984. Hernton, Calvin. “The Passion of Robert Hayden.” Obsidian: Black Literature Review. Robert Hayden issue, edited by Michael S. Harper. 8, no. 11 (Spring 1981) 176–181. “Reading Guide: Robert Hayden.” Poetryfoundation. org. Available online. URL: http://www.poetry foundation.org/archive/feature.guidebook.html? id=177415. Accessed May 10, 2007. “Robert Hayden.” Poets.org. 1997–2007. The Academy of American Poets. Available online. URL: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/196. Accessed May 10, 2007. Williams, Pontheolla. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Deborah James

Joseph Heller (1923–1999) War is no comedy; it’s a tragedy. . . . People find things to laugh at in Catch-22 and probably they will in the play, but that’s just because laughter is part of life. The things I write are funny only up to a point. Actually I am a very morbid, melancholy person. I’m preoccupied with death, disease and misfortune. (Interview with Elenore Lester, New York Times, 3 December 1967)

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he novelist, satirist, short story writer, playwright, and screenplay writer Joseph Heller is best known for Catch-22 (1961), a postwar novel fi lled with dark humor that lampoons government bureaucracy, big business, and the military. This novel, along with the work of his contemporaries KURT VONNEGUT and Thomas Pynchon, inaugurated a new era of sociocritical, ironical literary responses to the cold war, post–World War II consumerism, and, eventually, the Vietnam War. Heller holds the honor of introducing a new phrase to the American vocabulary: Catch-22, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, denotes “a supposed law or regulation containing provisions which are mutually frustrating [or . . .] a set of circumstances in which one requirement [is] dependent upon another, which is in turn dependent upon the fi rst.” This concept, used to characterize how individuals get trapped in the contradictory and absurd machinations of modern bureaucracies, forms the novel’s central trope and a dominant theme in Heller’s works. Although Heller’s subsequent 10 novels, autobiographical memoirs, and plays never received the critical success of his fi rst novel, Catch-22 is a landmark work in 20th century American fiction that has sold over 18 million copies and continues to be taught and read in high schools and colleges across the United States. Heller was born on May 1, 1923, to Russian Jewish immigrants, Lena and Isaac Heller, in Brooklyn,

New York. Lena knew very little English, so little that Heller and his two older siblings, Sylvia and Lee, had to coach her so that she could be eligible to vote. Isaac, an agnostic socialist, drove a delivery truck for a bakery until he bled to death after having surgery when young Joseph was five. Heller later recalled in his autobiography, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (1998), the profound effect his father’s untimely departure had on his psyche: “I was biting my fingernails at the age of seven. And except for two hospital confinements very much later, during which my anxieties were focused on inescapable concerns, I have gone on biting them and still do” (14). These anxieties about death, which preoccupied Heller’s mind at a very young age, are reflected in the preoccupations of his protagonists, such as John Yossarian in Catch-22 and Closing Time or Bob Slocum, the narrator of Something Happened (1974). Growing up in moderate poverty amid the ocean beaches and amusement parks of Coney Island, Heller became familiar with the nature of public spectacles, confidence tricks, and rampant capitalism at a young age. On the decline as a tourist destination for Heller’s entire childhood, many of the rides and prize stands that populated Coney Island prospered by luring customers to spend money for things of inferior value. As Heller later recalled: “All of this [provided] practical, worldly knowledge that taught us to always look for fair value for money. We also learned at an early age a fact of capitalism that directed us toward

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the antithetical principal that it is usually impossible to obtain fair value” (Now and Then 51). The contradictory and absurd nature of the predicament consumers found themselves in at Coney Island made a strong impression on Heller. The barkers, who would walk up to passers-by and offer to guess their age, weight, occupation, or other personal information, provided another bit of “practical, worldly knowledge” for the young Heller, who described the spectacle as follows: “The fact was that the barker could never lose. He knew no more about the tricks of the trade than you do, but he always came out ahead, right or wrong, because the customer could never win . . . [because] the prize at stake invariably cost him less, considerably less, than the patron had spent to win it” (51–52). As David Seed has observed, Heller’s comic and absurd vision of the world seems to have been partially gleaned from the showmen who populated his childhood. Since his siblings already had jobs in Manhattan, Heller had many hours alone at the family apartment to read whatever was available, which included short stories and essays from magazines like Collier’s, Liberty, and the New Yorker. Heller also loved the novels of the British humorist P. G. Wodehouse and the humorous writings of Robert Benchley. Heller attended and graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. During his years there he distinguished himself as an especially creative student. Early signs of Heller’s artistic leanings include a book report he wrote on Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) that was written from Tom Sawyer’s perspective, and an autobiographical, first-person account of the metal used to make the gun that killed Abraham Lincoln (Now and Then 15). Heller recalls, “I was born, I remember, in a mine in Chile, in a shovelful of iron ore” (15). These ambitions to write prompted Heller, then 16, to submit a short story inspired by Russia’s recent invasion of Finland to various periodicals. Following the valiant efforts of a lone Finnish soldier trying to fend off Russian invaders, it was rejected. After graduating from high school in 1941, Heller enrolled in night school at Brooklyn College. Before classes commenced, he dropped out, favoring the

nocturnal social life New York afforded him. In the year that followed, Heller worked various jobs, most notably as a file clerk for a casualty insurance company—an experience he was later to revisit through Bob Slocum’s character in Something Happened— before joining the Army Air Corps in 1942. Stationed with the 488th Squadron of the 340th Bombardment Group at Alisan, Corsica, during the height of World War II, Heller served as a wing bombardier in the twin-engine, medium-range B-25 bomber. From their sunny Mediterranean base, the 488th was assigned to bomb rail and highway bridges in support of the Allied advance through France and Italy. Heller eventually flew 60 missions in the flakladen skies of southern Europe. Many of the harrowing events John Yossarian, the antihero of Catch-22, lives through actually happened to Heller during his time in combat. At first, the routine risks of flying over heavily defended cities did little to affect Heller’s psyche: He remembered these early brushes with potential disaster as like “a fantasy nightmare from which I had luckily escaped without harm in my trusting innocence, like an ingenious kid in a Grimm fairy tale” (Now and Then 178). On August 15, 1944, the day allied forces landed at Normandy, Heller’s squadron incurred heavy casualties during a bombing run on the bridges at Avignon in southern France. After his copilot became temporarily crazy, purposefully diving the plane back into the clouds of flak they had just escaped, Heller had to attend to a wounded fellow crew member. This mission changed the face of the war for Heller, shattering his fearless innocence and serving as the basis for one of the climactic scenes in Catch-22. Heller was terrified of flying for the rest of his life, electing to return to the States in a troop carrier when his tour of duty finally ended. In his time overseas Heller was promoted to lieutenant, earning an Air Medal and a Presidential Unit Citation. After completing his 60th mission—under the protective cover of extra armored vests—Heller had to wait in Alisan for his orders, spending much of his time in front of a borrowed typewriter writing short stories. Although he emulated the works of authors familiar to Heller at the time, such as the novelists

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Ernest Hemingway and Jerome Weidman and short story writers William Saroyan and Irwin Shaw, these efforts little resembled the semiautobiographical narratives for which he would become famous. The only surviving work from this period, “I Don’t Love You Anymore,” chronicles the return of a married serviceman from combat duty and his realization that he no longer loves his wife. His first published work, the 2,000-word piece appeared in the publication Story in 1945. Upon his return, Heller married his affluent girlfriend, Shirley Held, whom he had met at a resort in the Catskills when on leave from the Air Corps, and boarded a train bound for Los Angeles, where he pursued an English degree at the University of Southern California under the GI Bill. Encouraged by his composition instructor Maurice Baudin and the Story editor Whit Burnett, Heller wrote a series of fiction and nonfiction pieces and submitted them for publication. Eventually, Esquire magazine accepted his short story “Beating the Bangtails,” under the title “Bookies, Beware!” (1947). Heller had written the story, a vignette on winning bets on horses at the track by utilizing “pure science,” for a freshman composition course. Ironically, the $200 Heller received for the essay was quickly lost at the track. Transferring to New York University, Heller continued writing for Esquire and the Atlantic Monthly, publishing another four stories before he completed his B.A. in 1948. Heller spent the next two years earning his master’s degree in English at Columbia University and studying overseas at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, as a Fulbright Scholar. These academic achievements earned him a place on the English faculty at Pennsylvania State College upon his return. Life as an academic proved to be unpalatable to the author, who, after only two years of teaching, decided to move into advertising, accepting a copywriter position at a small advertising agency in 1952. Over the next nine years Heller held various advertising positions at Time, Look, and, finally, McCall’s. This prolonged exposure to corporate culture and office politics would eventually form the basis for Heller’s second novel, Something Happened (1974). It was during this nine-year stint in advertising that Heller composed his first novel and master-

work, Catch-22. In 1955 Heller got the first chapter of Catch-22 (then entitled Catch-18) published in the anthology New World Writing #7, a collection that also contained an excerpted chapter from JACK K EROUAC’s novel-in-progress On the Road (1957). Three years later, he signed a contract with Simon and Schuster for the publication of Catch-18, then only one third finished. As the 1961 publication date approached, Heller’s editor noticed that a prominent science fiction writer, Leon Uris, was due to publish a novel entitled Mila 18 the same year. To prevent confusion, Heller chose the number 22 instead, a number that, Heller admitted, fit the novel better since repetition is such a significant device in the narrative. Despite Heller’s obscurity in the publishing world and to the reading public, Catch-22 enjoyed early financial success as an “underground” hit, partly due to an extensive publicity campaign by the publisher. Critical reception was polarized, with critics such as Whitney Balliet decrying the unconventional and repetitive style of the novel in his review for the New Yorker. Others took issue with the unpatriotic attitude of Heller’s deserting protagonist or the irreverent sexual references sprinkled throughout the narrative. Nonetheless, many reviewers heaped praise upon Heller’s first published effort, as Robert Brustein, in the New Republic, proclaimed it to be “one of the most bitterly funny works in the language.” Soon after it became obvious that he could make a living by the pen, Heller quit his promotions manager job at McCall’s and devoted his full attention to writing. While it took 14 years for Heller to write his next novel, Something Happened (1974), he wrote several dramatic works in the intervening years. In 1967, Heller’s two-act play, We Bombed in New Haven, was produced at Yale. The play contains many allusions to other wars and creates an overall sense of disconnection: The actors play actors who believe they are performing roles as air force servicemen in an unnamed modern war. The action of the play includes both actors performing roles and scenes where the actors reflect on the roles they are playing, thus highlighting the fictional nature of the work. Here Heller casts a wide net, reflecting upon the fictional nature of war news, the way informa-

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tion about combat is withheld from both servicemen and the public, and voices a strong antiwar message at the height of the Vietnam War. Heller also created a dramatization of Catch-22 in 1971, and Clevenger’s Trial, a one-act play drawn from the eighth chapter of the novel, a flashback in which Yossarian recalls Lieutenant Schiesskopf’s fascination with military parades. Heller’s second novel, Something Happened, depicts the business world through the eyes of Bob Slocum, who, through dreams and memories, tries to understand what has made him who he is: the “something” that “happened” to him. Through Slocum, a business manager experiencing a midlife crisis, Heller critiques corporate business culture, depicting the vacuous nature and spiritual bankruptcy of uppermiddle-class American life. With his next novel, Good as Gold (1979), Heller presents a parody of the American Jewish novel through Bruce Gold, an English professor who aspires to a high-ranking governmental position. Again, Heller depicts the federal government, with all of its political machinations and bureaucratic red tape, to comment upon the absurd nature of contemporary American society. Next, Heller wrote God Knows (1984), another comic novel, this time one that takes on a subject some considered blasphemous: a first-person biography of King David on his deathbed that is a thinly veiled allegory for the plight of the modern Jew. While writing God Knows, Heller developed Guillain-Barré syndrome (for more information on this rare immune disorder, see http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/gbs/gbs.htm). Eventually Heller became completely paralyzed, suffering with this debilitating condition for two full years before recovery. With his friend Speed Vogel, Heller reflected on this experience in No Laughing Matter (1986), which chronicles his illness. Five works mark the end of Heller’s illustrious career: Picture This (1987), a meditation on Rembrandt’s Homer Contemplating the Bust of Apollo (to see an image of the painting, search the Internet for a site such as http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/histart/ images/questions/aristotle_bust_homer.jpg), Closing Time (1994), a sequel to Catch-22, which picks up the life of the twice-divorced Yossarian and is set in Coney Island and New York; Now and Then: From

Coney Island to Here (1998), an autobiographical memoir; and the posthumously published Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man (2000), a novel about an elderly author who tries to write a novel that will be as successful as his earlier work, a plot that mirrors Heller’s writing career. In addition to enriching our modern lexicon, Catch-22 earned Heller the reputation as one of the most significant American novelists in the second half of the 20th century. As did George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), Catch-22 not only spoke to a disillusioned generation but helped form our understanding of the dehumanizing aspects of war; the convoluted, senseless nature of modern institutions; and the absurd nature of bureaucratic doublespeak.

Catch-22 (1961) Inspired by Heller’s experiences as a bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the latter half of World War II, Catch-22 remains one of the greatest satirical works of American fiction in the 20th century. Though belonging to the war novel genre, Catch-22 has as its major preoccupation the conflict between individuals and what Heller calls “the contemporary regimented business society,” a theme he later explored directly in his second novel, Something Happened (Heller, Realist 30). Heller’s protagonist in Catch-22, John Yossarian, spends the entire novel trying to stay alive in a world where everybody, he is convinced, is trying to kill him. This conviction, which initially sounds absurd and paranoid, becomes increasingly plausible to the reader as Heller describes the ineptitude, insanity, and prevailing disregard for humanity surrounding Yossarian. At the start of the novel, Yossarian seems mentally unstable, paranoid, cowardly, and depraved. By the end of the narrative, after readers have been inculcated with Heller’s vision of modern war and military bureaucracy, Yossarian appears to be the sanest of men, trying to extricate himself from an insane world that values conformity over common sense, profit over ethics, obedience over life. A darkly humorous and satirical novel, Catch-22 follows—albeit in an experimental, nonlinear manner—

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the wartime trials of Captain John Yossarian, a bombardier stationed on the fictitious island of Pianosa during World War II. Unlike his fellow officers, Yossarian remains unmoved by patriotism or any other rationale for putting his life at risk: For Yossarian, the only goal worth pursuing is staying alive. To this end, Yossarian attempts to ground himself and his squadron from combat missions in various, often humorous ways. All of Yossarian’s attempts to avoid combat by claiming insanity are foiled by “catch-22,” an unofficial but all-pervasive law that states that anyone concerned for his life in the face of imminent death is rational and therefore not crazy enough to be grounded. This law takes various forms at different points in the narrative but always serves as a mechanism to entrap Yossarian, keeping him anchored to his appointed cog in the big, bureaucratic war machine. Faced with no alternatives and few surviving friends, who are “disappeared” one by one, Yossarian eventually deserts to Sweden. Though Catch-22 can and should be considered a part of the war novel genre, as exemplified by such works as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), Heller populates Pianosa almost exclusively with flat caricatures of the character types normally used in the genre, often confounding our expectations. The commanding officer of the squadron, for example, Major Major Major, promoted by a glitch in an I.B.M. machine, is a hyperbolic caricature of the inept and out-of-touch superior, a leader so ineffective and distant that he orders his assistant to bar anyone from his office while he is there. Lieutenant Sheisskopf, Yossarian’s cuckolded commander while he is being trained to go overseas, who dreams of the day when he can surgically alter his cadets with metal rods so they can march in perfect lockstep, is yet another parody of the incompetent superior, in this case one bent on enforcing total conformity. Major Major Major’s executive officer, Major——de Coverley is a humorous example of the brave, steely eyed wartime commander who leads from the front lines. Often present at the head of the allied advance, de Coverley has one significant achievement, his prompt securing of apartments and maids in the recently liberated city of Rome for the squadron’s vacationing officers and enlisted men.

Other character types abound in the novel, comically exaggerated beyond the semblance of realism. The affable southerner is represented by the friendly and patriotic Texan Yossarian encounters in the hospital ward whom no one can stand to be around. The various ethnic character types that populate war novels are caricatured by the alcoholic Chief White Halfoat, whose oil-divining Native American family has been chased off whatever land they occupy by oil companies. Here Heller is obviously satirizing the disenfranchisement of Native Americans during and after America’s westward expansion, as well as playing off the conventions of the war novel. Thus, Catch-22 parodies the war novel genre to great comic effect while depicting war itself in a grotesque, dark, and serious fashion. Heller maintains Catch-22’s somber and dark depiction of war by structuring the comic episodes of the novel around retellings of Yossarian’s mission to Avignon, during which he sees a crew member, Snowden, slowly die of wounds suffered from an explosion of flak. These flashbacks become incrementally clearer with each repetition, eventually culminating in the disclosure of Snowden’s “secret”; after Snowden’s innards spill out of a wound Yossarian had not seen or treated, he observes: “Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out of a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all” (Catch-22 404). This passage, echoing a line from William Shakespeare’s 1608 play King Lear (5.2.9), not only articulates the frailty of life—the delicate mortality of human beings—but also marks Yossarian’s realization that the institutions that bind him will eventually turn him into “garbage”: a man without a soul. This realization jars Yossarian out of his complacency, awakening him to the absurdities inherent in risking one’s life for no particularly compelling reason. As the infinitely pragmatic and self-preserving old Italian responsible for injuring Major——de Coverley’s eye states, “It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees” (Catch-22 233). The old man, as becomes clear during his long exchange with Yossarian’s young and patriotic friend Nately, embodies and articulates the philosophy of

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action Heller’s protagonist arrives at after the mission to Avignon: No nation—which the old man describes as “a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural.”—is worth dying for (232). After this ordeal, a ceremony is held to award Yossarian a medal for his heroism, to which he shows up naked, unadorned by the blood-soaked uniform that has placed him in harm’s way and now serves as a testament to Snowden’s “secret.” The “madness” Yossarian exhibits throughout the novel is caused by this scarring event, an event that, as it is recounted with more and more detail, justifies Yossarian’s temperament and reveals the prevailing insanity that surrounds him. As we can see in the elaborately conceived outline for Catch-22 (which can be found in the second appendix of David M. Craig’s Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction), Heller was deliberate in his construction of the novel’s chaotic narration, taking great pains to ensure its formal coherency. In this sense, Heller follows the art of the novel as described by Henry James and E. M. Forster. But what makes Heller’s work so distinctive, so jarring, is the way he deals with time, the back-and-forth movement that makes the reader of Catch-22 dizzy. Everything happens at once, and yet nothing is easily sorted out, an effect that, along with Heller’s use of repetition, echoes the cognitive illness Yossarian feigns after his roommate in a stateside hospital starts “seeing everything twice.” In this way, Heller comments on the way we think—the random and associational way that thoughts and memories intrude on the present, jarring us from the present and whirling us ceaselessly, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, into the past. In yet another way, this “double vision” Yossarian assumes is an apt metaphor for the comic and tragic elements Heller continually juxtaposes throughout the novel. Incidents that readers are initially inclined to fi nd humorous, such as Yossarian’s nakedness at the award ceremony, or the hijinks that ensue when Yossarian and his friends vacation in Rome, are later cast in a dark, grotesque fashion, forcing us to reevaluate them, to “see them twice.” This narrative strategy adds to the sense of absurdity the novel cultivates, mirroring the central concept Heller introduces us to: Just as “catch-22”

—a paradoxical statement or series of statements that undermine their own validity—involves negation, the comic elements of the novel are overtaken by grotesque and tragic depictions of death and loss. Comedy remains, but it coexists with the tragic in a nebulous and chaotic space, a space detached from the reader’s common understanding of time. In addition to repeating the Snowden episode with more clarity as the novel progresses, Heller adds a sense of forward movement to the nonchronological narrative of Catch-22 by increasing the number of missions Yossarian and the other crew members have to complete before they can be sent home. Colonel Cathcart, the group commander under whom Yossarian serves, is a self-serving and incompetent administrator whose only objective in the war is to produce “tight bomb patterns” for his superiors to admire in postbombing reconnaissance photos. Despite the fact that bomber crews, according to headquarters, need only complete 40 combat missions, Cathcart is convinced that raising the number will make his bomber group seem all the more heroic, a “feather in his cap” that will contribute to a future promotion. In accordance with the laws of “catch-22,” Yossarian and his fellow airmen are officially required to complete 40 missions, but, since they must obey their commanding officer, are compelled to complete as many missions as Cathcart pleases. Thus, one of the only linear elements in Catch-22’s plot is the raising of the number of required missions—a progressive lessening of the value of human life—in the name of Cathcart’s petty desire for advancement. The only respite for Yossarian and the other airmen lies in the hospital ward or the apartments appropriated for their R&R time in Rome, where alcohol and prostitutes are indulged in with great zeal. The dehumanizing effects of bureaucracy on the individual, where men become numbers that are mechanistically shuffled about without regard for their humanity, are symbolically represented in the novel by the soldier in white. An airman presumably burned beyond recognition and encased in a full body cast, the soldier in white is a fi xture in the hospital ward Yossarian and his friend Dunbar have fled to with feigned illnesses at the beginning of the narrative. With his entire body covered in white gauze,

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save for his mouth and two tubes though which the nurses remove his liquid waste, the soldier in white is a symbolic representation of what the military bureaucracy turns human beings into. Yossarian and Dunbar go so far as to speculate whether or not the hidden soldier is alive or even exists. This perceived lack of humanity betrays Heller’s scathing view of both war and modern bureaucracy. Prefiguring the fate of many of Yossarian’s friends, the unknown soldier is whisked off when no one is looking, “disappeared” by the opaque workings of the military machine, itself a representation of the ever-expanding role of institutions in the contemporary world. Yet what also traps Yossarian and, by analogy, all of us, is the language we use, the sort of bureaucratic language of which military regulations, business correspondences, and medical terminology are made. The characters who populate Heller’s vision of World War II, flat as they are, are stripped of humanity, reduced to insignificant signs. As does the soldier in white, whose presence is only marked by the cast that surrounds him, the characters lack individuality and substance: Their presence—even their existence—is marked only by their name, rank, and serial number. This substitution of language for life is exemplified by the predicament of Doc Daneeka, the group’s physician, who, according to the squadron log, has died in a plane crash. Despite the fact that he is very much alive and protesting his deceased status, the world goes on, incapable of recognizing his existence after it has ceased on paper. Yossarian, at the opening of the novel, is engaged in subverting language as he subverts every other form of bureaucratic restraint in the novel, declaring “death to all modifiers” as he censors the letters of enlisted men to their families from his hospital bed. Just as Yossarian’s moving of the bomb line on the briefing room map causes the chain of command to postpone the bombing of a heavily fortified city, these acts of subversion catch on. Others who feel marginalized, such as Major Major Major, appropriate “Washington Irving,” Yossarian’s reversible pen name. Undercover CID men, incompetent equivalents of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, are dispatched by wing headquarters to arrest this Washington Irving, who only exists in official correspondences and personal

letters. Similarly, Yossarian’s signing of the “Anabaptist” Chaplain’s name to one of these letters makes him a perpetual object of suspicion. In Heller’s world of institutions, imaginary people become real and actual characters are “disappeared,” through both physical means and language. In either case, the reality of the novel and accounts of reality in the novel become blurred, each exerting a nearly equal effect on the plot. The policing of language on Pianosa and the resulting infestation of C.I.D. men form a thinly veiled commentary on the paranoia, suspicion, and tattletale characteristic of postwar American society during the McCarthy hearings, a time when the mere suggestion of communist sympathies, however unfounded, was enough to attract the attention of the FBI. Toward the end of the novel, Heller expands this vision of how the modern world dehumanizes people during Yossarian’s attempt to find and save “Nately’s whore’s kid-sister” in the streets of Rome. This Dantesque descent, which catalogs various manifestations of human depravity and cruelty, ends with Yossarian’s confronting Aarfy, the bumbling, gentlemanly, and aloof fraternity brother who serves as navigator in his plane, after he pushes a prostitute out of his bedroom window. This morally reprehensible act is unpunished by the police, who immediately put Yossarian under arrest for being in Rome without permission. Again, Heller portrays the military bureaucracy as being more concerned with its own logistical rules and objectives than anything resembling ethical conduct. In the end, Yossarian’s only alternative is to desert to Sweden, following the example of his tent mate, Orr, who, it would seem, fits Heller’s conception of what a smart, self-preserving individual should do in Yossarian’s predicament. A handyman who builds a gas stove from scratch in their tent, Orr is patient and detail-oriented. Just as he constantly fidgets with the gas valve on the stove, Orr observes the mechanism that has entrapped him and slowly practices escaping, crash landing his plane in the Mediterranean many times before he ditches it and paddles to Sweden in a life raft. Unlike Yossarian’s comic acts of resistance and ineffectual attempts to con the system, Orr provides the lasting solution: Leave when no one is looking.

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Heller has stated that Catch-22 has more to do with “the contemporary regimented business society” of postwar America than any of his experiences in Europe (Realist 30). Though it is hard to put aside the grotesque and absurd depictions of war in Catch-22, one can glimpse the Coney Island barkers, incapable of losing, behind every catch Yossarian encounters. Indeed, much can be made of the satirical lens Heller provides readers to view contemporary, commercialized society: Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder, squadron mess officer, and his one-man corporation, M&M Enterprises, is a splendid representation of capitalism and thinly veiled greed run amok, despite Milo’s seemingly benign and goodhearted intent. Having a natural knack for navigating the often twisted logic of supply and demand, Milo profits from selling eggs for less than he buys them, only erring when he corners the market on Egyptian cotton and cannot sell any of it. An example of good intentions gone awry, Milo tries to cover the cotton in chocolate and feed it to the squadron. The spectacle of Milo’s mercenary courier fleet, comprising of both German and allied bombers, bombing the wing’s own airstrip for a profit is a brilliant, albeit hyperbolic, representation of the absurdities and hypocrisies that result when market forces supplant or remain unchecked by ethical considerations. Moreover, Heller’s blurring of the war effort with Milo’s empire of black market commerce echoes concerns many had during the cold war (and continue to have) regarding what President Dwight Eisenhower referred to as the “military-industrial complex.” This term denotes the intimate relationship between those in the American government who control the prosecution of foreign policy and the powerful manufacturing firms that produce weaponry and matériel. These corporations, profit-seeking and influential, are often feared to have a negative influence over U.S. foreign policy that is contrary to the will of the American people and not oriented toward peaceful resolutions of potentially violent international conflict. A hilarious and profound statement on war, American society, and the absurd existential predicament of individuals enveloped by the invasive workings of modern bureaucracy, Catch-22 continues to be read and taught across the nation. Heller’s unconven-

tional narrative style and adept blend of comic and grotesque elements in his first novel distinguished him as a promising young writer with a unique vision of his craft. By virtue of his performance in Catch-22, Heller occupies a place in the history of letters populated by such renowned writers as Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Many of the insights Heller fleshed out in the novel still ring true today, offering us an entertaining and biting satire on war and modern bureaucracy.

For Discussion or Writing 1. As does Catch-22, R ANDALL JARRELL’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” shows not only the debilitating effects of war but also its long-term psychological effects, which continue to plague both civilian and veteran alike. In Jarrell’s poem, the soldier/child narrator describes his own death, echoing the author’s own tormented psyche. In Catch-22, the narrator (Yossarian) recounts the death of Snowden; the memory of his death not only haunts the narrator but also intervenes in the narration so that the form of the book is structured around his remembrances of a catastrophic event. With both works in mind, write a well-developed essay on memory and loss as this theme is played out in Jarrell’s poem and in Heller’s novel. 2. There are many similarities between Catch-22 and The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War, an unfinished novel written in 1923 by the Czechoslovakian humorist Jaroslav Hasek. Heller himself, according to Arnošt Lustig, admitted that the composition of his novel would have been impossible had he not read Hasek’s satire, which stands as one of the first antiwar novels published in modern times. After reading Hasek’s novel, write a well-developed essay exploring the similarities between the two works. How does Heller adapt and appropriate Hasek’s World War I satire? Are these changes the result of Heller’s interest in satirizing postwar America, or does Heller have a distinctly unique worldview that necessitates a change in narrative style and content? Be sure to refer to specific sections in the texts to bolster your argument.

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3. Catch-22, despite its comic and satirical qualities, is a novel about war. Read other examples of the war novel genre: Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). Next, compare Heller’s treatment of the subject with that of these two other seminal authors known for their sober, realistic depictions of war. Think about the tone of these three works and the way they convey their antiwar messages. Finally, write a well-developed essay that evaluates Heller’s work in light of the other two works and considers whether satire is an appropriate medium to deal with loss. 4. Watch Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), a depiction of World War I trench warfare and a story of soldiers, who, when weighing their own value against the futility of fighting, choose to retreat, ultimately being tried and executed for dereliction of duty. Think about what Kubrick accomplishes by using a hyperrealistic depiction of war and then contrast his representation with the graphic scenes in Heller’s Catch-22. Finally, write a well-developed essay on the representation of violence in fiction, citing both works to support everything you say. Be sure to consider the different mediums and how their differences affect the reader/viewer. 5. As yet another contrast to Heller’s representation of war and drawing upon a completely different genre, read section 15 of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865), a poignant tribute to President Abraham Lincoln and a lamentation for those lost in the Civil War. Finally, assess both Heller’s and Whitman’s depiction of violence. Are the two complementary? Does one justify violence, or do they both vilify the notion of a “just war”? 6. Intertextuality deals with the relationship between texts, the way works of fiction reference one another and relate to one another. Sometimes authors create deliberate relationships; other times authors, working independently, cover similar ground, creating works that resonate with each other. Regardless of whether authors intend their works to be compared, we

see them differently when we encounter them in tandem. This is the nature of intertextuality: We negotiate the world through texts that we string together, forging an overall narrative and even a worldview based on our reading/viewing. With this in mind, read M*A*S*H: A Novel about Three Army Doctors by Richard Hooker and see Robert Altman’s movie M*A*S*H. Finally, write a welldeveloped essay that assesses how these works and Catch-22 form a composite picture of war in the 20th century. 7. K EN K ESEY’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) deals with the institutionalization of individuals considered to be insane. Similarly, those around him consider Catch-22’s protagonist, John Yossarian, insane. In a well-developed essay, compare Heller’s and Kesey’s treatment of madness and how the novel’s respective institutions deal with it. Pay special attention to Heller’s descriptions of Yossarian’s time in hospitals, especially the episode when we are introduced to the man who “sees everything twice.” Do Kesey and Heller share similar views regarding institutions? More specifically, compare the strategies John Yossarian and Randle Patrick McMurphy employ to subvert these institutions.

Something Happened (1974) Published 14 years after Catch-22, Something Happened is an entirely different world from his first novel. Whereas past trauma existed side by side with the present in the mind of John Yossarian, Something Happened introduces us to a world where hopes and dreams are lost in a forgotten past, elided in a distinctive moment that Bob Slocum, the novel’s protagonist, cannot remember. The novel, narrated in the first person, forms a kind of all-encompassing confession, a monologue during which Bob Slocum confides all of his fears, insecurities, and problems, attempting to trace them back to his early adulthood and childhood. His stated motivation for doing this is to find the “something” that happened to him, the event or series of events that marked his loss of self. As he states:

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There are long gaps in my past that remain obscure and give no clue. There are cryptic rumblings inside them but no flashes of recall. They are pitch black and remain that way, and all the things I was and all the changes and things that happened to me then will be lost to me forever unless I find them. No one else will. (Something Happened 134)

Thus, the project of the novel is for Slocum, a character so inauthentic that even his handwriting is borrowed from someone else, to unearth his identity out of the overabundant facts that make up his life. Loosely following Heller’s own life, Slocum tells us in great detail of his time as a file clerk at an insurance company and his executive position at a corporation, where he “sells selling.” Slocum describes the absurdities of office politics and the demoralizing effects they have on his mind as he longs to give a three-minute presentation at the company conference in Puerto Rico. He details numerous infidelities he has committed with prostitutes, coworkers, and acquaintances. He also probes his unfulfi lling relationship with his wife, as well as with his two older children, for clues about what has happened to his psyche. His youngest child, Derek, is mentally handicapped and taken care of almost exclusively by a nanny. The Slocums debate whether or not they should stop housing him and send him to an institution. All of these facts are presented in an associational manner by the narrator, who intersperses descriptions of his current situation with reminiscences of childhood and an unconsummated love affair he had as a young fi le clerk with a girl named Virginia, who ultimately committed suicide. By the end of the novel, Slocum, seems to be suffering from a mental breakdown, causing the narrative to become more and more fragmented. Finally, we learn that Slocum accidentally suffocated his elder son while trying to comfort him after a car hit him. As Catch-22 does, Something Happened focuses on the tortured psyche of a single protagonist. Unlike Catch-22, with its hard-hitting, dark humor and comic absurdities, Something Happened tackles the absurdity of cookie-cutter, upper-middle-class suburban life to unveil the ultimate emptiness of

modern society. Instead of discovering that the madness of his protagonist is actually a sane response to a mad world, Heller forces readers of Something Happened to recognize how deeply this world permeates the psyche of Slocum, causing the dissolution of his identity. In this sense, the novel presents Heller at his darkest, creating a psychological portrait of an unlikable character with whom it is difficult to empathize. But, lest the book be portrayed as nihilistic, it is important to look at Bob Slocum’s desires: the things he wants that the world will not grant. As he tells us near the end of the novel: I wish I were part of a large family circle and enjoyed it. I would like to fit in. I wish I believed in God. I liked shelled walnuts and raisins at home when I was a child and cracked the walnuts and mixed them all with the raisins in a dish before I began eating. My mother sent out for ice cream often in the spring and summer. In the fall we had good charlotte russes. I would spin tops. I remember the faces of the street cleaners. (Something Happened 496)

Here, and throughout his many ruminations, we feel the sort of longing that can be associated with homesickness and lack of a philosophy: the emphatic need to find and make meaning in a world in which love, trust, and community are horrifically absent. Even when thinking about extramarital affairs and the possibility of falling in love, what remains is Slocum’s desire to be elsewhere. As he said, “I wish there were someone I could hire by the hour to go through the whole wearying procedure for me from beginning to end, even to experiencing those ritualistic qualms of guilt, concern, and remorse without which a conscience can never feel antiseptically pure again” (Something Happened 519). In short, Slocum cannot participate. Like a Camus character trapped in an existential quandary, a Kafka character who cannot be understood, or a Beckett or Dante character caught in a kind of purgatorial state, Slocum is a tortured man who cannot bridge the gulf between what he wishes to make out of life and what he is capable of doing. Here Heller targets those things that are near and dear to us all, tearing them

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asunder and placing them at an unreachable distance. But for those who read the novel and seek to draw meaning from it, the question remains: What is all the misery about, and how can all this misery end? The answer, of course, is that it is about nothing and it cannot be fi xed. As with the ultimate horizon that defines human life—death—the meaninglessness of the world can never be faced straight on. And perhaps this is what makes Heller’s work so devastating, so painful to read. The narrator of Something Happened is Yossarian’s antithesis: Whereas Catch22’s protagonist is well aware of who he is and what he needs to escape from, Bob Slocum opts for being “garbage.” He is so entrenched in the bureaucracies and anxieties that surround him that Slocum’s spirit, like that of Snowden, the perpetual victim of Heller’s first novel, is no longer discernable, even to himself: Who am I? I think I’m beginning to find out. I am a stick: I am a broken waterlogged branch floating with my own crowd in this one nation of ours, indivisible (unfortunately), under God, with liberty and justice for all who are speedy enough to seize them fi rst and hog them away from the rest. . . . I float like algae in a colony of green scum. (Something Happened 305–306)

Early in the novel Slocum confesses: “Something did happen to me somewhere that robbed me of confidence and courage and left me with a fear of discovery and change and a positive dread of everything unknown that may occur” (Something Happened 8). This dread of the unknown, this fear of change that permeates the entire novel, obviously prefigures Slocum’s accidental killing of his eldest son, who is never named in the novel. On a more symbolic level, however, Slocum is terrified of what he will find at the end of his long, sober, and painful self-examination. Perhaps at the core of Slocum’s being there is the corpse of a child—the remains of an authentic, whole person—crushed and suffocated by acquiescence and fear, contorted by the strictures of a society that values conformity above all else. The only son of Slocum’s who survives is destined to live a life completely derived from and dependent upon others who do not really love him.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In his October 6, 1974 review for the New York Times Book Review, Kurt Vonnegut said that “Something Happened is so astonishingly pessimistic, in fact, that it can be called a daring experiment.” Of course, we might question Vonnegut’s stance because he is one of America’s best-known humorists, but for the purposes of this question, let us assume that Vonnegut means exactly what he says. With Vonnegut’s thought in mind, assess Heller’s vision as it is given through Bob Slocum. Is Heller a pessimist? If so, why? What makes this novel so dark when compared to Catch-22? With well-chosen quotes, argue why you believe the novel either is or is not pessimistic in its outlook. 2. While Kurt Vonnegut labels Something Happened a “pessimistic work,” critics have levied the same charge about Vonnegut’s masterwork, Slaughterhouse-Five, and about Mark Twain’s posthumously published novel Mysterious Stranger. With these three works in mind, write a well-developed essay that examines the novels from a humanistic perspective, questioning the “pessimistic” claim and fi nding moments where future possibilities exist in this works. While these works no doubt work largely by negation, we can, through our own imaginations, supply what the works lack, which may be, in fact, where we can see these writers’ optimism: in the blanks we as reader’s must fi ll. 3. Read Albert Camus’s essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” observing what Camus says about Sisyphus’s fate and his heroic qualities. Then, write a well-developed essay that explores how Bob Slocum can be viewed as the absurd, existential hero. To round out your work, you may want to read Camus’s companion piece, The Stranger, which is narrated by a similarly dispassionate narrator who longs to enter life. 4. In his essay “Joseph Heller’s Milk Train: Nothing More to Express” (Washington Post Book World, 6 October 1974), Joseph Epstein argues that description in the novel takes the place of plot or character development and this description takes the form of a confession:

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In the nearly 600-page monologue provided by Bob Slocum, there is no attempt to understand what is going on, but only to describe what it feels like to live under the malaise. Much as if he were talking to a tireless and well-paid psychoanalyst, Slocum rambles on confessionally, formlessly, repetitiously. Anxieties slide into fantasies, fantasies into terrors, terrors into nostalgia. It is almost as if we, the novel’s readers, are in the psychoanalyst’s chair, notebook on lap, a decanter of hot coffee on the desk, patiently awaiting the completion of the analysand’s tale, so that we might then return to the quiet of our study, reassemble the data, and offer an answer to what exactly has happened.

Similarly, both J. D. SALINGER’s Catcher in the Rye and SYLVIA PLATH’s The Bell Jar are written as confessional and deal with pulling fragments of experience together. With these three works in mind, write a well-developed essay on the novel as a confessional form. What value does the confessional convey? And how does presenting the story in this way affect our experience as readers? 5. Toward the end of the novel, Slocum thinks about his position in society and about social status in general: Most of the people around me seem to make more money than I do. Where I live now is perfectly adequate: and when I get my raise and move, it will again be among people who make more money than I do. This is known as upward mobility, a momentous force in contemporary American urban life, along with downward mobility, which is another momentous force in contemporary American life. They keep things stirring. We rise and fall like Frisbees, if we get off the ground at all, or pop fl ies, except we rise slower, drop faster. I am on the way up, Kagle’s on the way down. He moves faster. Only in America is it possible to do both at the same time.

Here Heller comments on the pursuit of the American dream, a subject explored by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and by EDWARD A LBEE in The American Dream. With these works in mind, write a well-developed essay on the American dream that these writers delineate. Are their works about disillusionment and failed potential in America cautionary; do they form a kind of social critique? If so, what value does this critique have for our lives? Be sure to quote the texts to support everything you say.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON HELLER AND HIS WORK 1. Write a research paper on modern warfare in the 20th century while drawing upon the following works of fiction: Catch-22, KURT VONNEGUT’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and a Vietnam movie such as The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and/ or Apocalypse Now. Consider how technology has affected the war experience and how it has affected those who have fought and who continue to fight in a hypertechnological age. 2. The American counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s was enamored of such concepts as universal love and truth, creating a mixture of pseudoreligious ideas with an idealistic dream of changing the world. Counterculture writers included “Beat” writers such as A LLEN GINSBERG, JACK K EROUAC, Neil Cassidy, and LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI. While works like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) personify a free, rootless existence, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Something Happened indict what Heller referred to as the “contemporary regimented business society” as it infected the military in World War II and the life of the advertising executive Bob Slocum. Explore the counterculture of the time through fictional works, comparing Catch-22, Something Happened, On the Road, and Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Do these three works posit ideals, ways of being? Are these ideals realistic? 3. Heller was obviously affected psychologically by the war and set out in Catch-22 not only to

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question war but also to question what defi nes rational human behavior: what can be considered to be sane and insane. Heller blurs the line between the “sane” systems human beings have erected and the “irrational” responses individuals have to these systems. With these in mind, how does Catch-22 compare with Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) on the theme of sanity and insanity? What do both say about the nature of institutions and the relationship of the individual’s need for autonomy with institutions’ need for order, regulation, and “sane” behavior? 4. Write a well-developed essay on the nature of suffering with the following works in mind: Catch-22, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, and the Book of Job in the Bible. Consider how each of the protagonists suffers and makes meaning out of the suffering. 5. Catch-22 works largely by negation: the use of irony and double irony that challenges the reader to make sense of the many ironies we encounter in life. Write a well-developed essay that compares Heller’s use of negation with Samuel Beckett’s use of negation in Waiting for Godot. What can be made of the “negative” way? Is it possible to gain positive insights into existence from works of literature that focus on the inherent contradictions and negative things we face as human beings? 6. Read Heller’s first play, We Bombed in New Haven (1969), noting the many moments when the actors refer to the play itself. Literary critics often call such experiential moments metafictional, which is to say that in such moments the play reflects upon itself specifically and on fiction in general. Next, read Bertrold Brecht’s Mother Courage, which also contains such metafictional moments. With both plays in mind, write a well-developed essay on the use of experimental, self-reflective techniques in drama. Focus on how these techniques affect the audience and our understanding of the plays.

WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Bradbury, Malcolm. Catch-22. New York: Everyman’s Library/Knopf, 1995. Craig, David M. Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Dodd, Burr. “Approaches to Catch-22.” In Approaches to the Novel, edited by John Colmer. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1967. Hasek, Jaroslav. The Good Soldier Svejk and His Fortunes in the World War. Translated by Cecil Parrot. New York: Penguin, 1973. Heller, Joseph. “Joseph Heller Replies.” Realist 50 (1964): 30. The Joseph Heller Archive. Available online. URL: http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/amlit/heller/ heller.html. Accessed March 25, 2009. Keegan, Brenda M. Joseph Heller: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Kiley, Frederick T., and Walter McDonald, eds. A Catch-22 Casebook. New York: Crowell, 1973. Mellard, James M. Doing Tropology: Analysis of Narrative Discourse. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Merrill, Robert. Joseph Heller. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Nagel, James, ed., Critical Essays on Joseph Heller. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Pinsker, Sanford. Understanding Joseph Heller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Potts, Stephen W. From Here to Absurdity: The Moral Battlefields of Joseph Heller. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1995. Ruderman, Judith. Joseph Heller. New York: Continuum, 1991. Seed, David. The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. Woodson, Jon. A Study of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: Going Around Twice. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

John Becker

Shirley Jackson (1919–1965) It is most agreeable to be a writer of fiction for several reasons—one of the most important being, of course, that you can persuade people that it is really work if you look haggard enough—but perhaps the most useful thing about being a writer of fiction is that nothing is ever wasted; all experience is good for something; you tend to see everything as a potential structure of words. (Come Along with Me)

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hirley Jackson’s works have aroused controversy among scholars, many of whom doubt their lasting importance, but no one denies that they have had a significant cultural impact on generations of Americans. With this impact and the renewed interest in her works in mind, Jackson warrants consideration as a great postwar American writer. Jackson’s early life was relatively uneventful. Born in San Francisco on December 14, 1919 (a number of accounts erroneously cite 1916 as her birth year), Shirley Hardie Jackson was the daughter of Geraldine Bugbee Jackson and Leslie Hardie Jackson, a child born into “comfort, pleasant surroundings, and social position, but to parents who never truly knew what to make of her, not in childhood and not throughout her entire forty-eight [sic] years” (Oppenheimer 11). When she was six years old, the Jacksons moved from the Ashbury Park section of San Francisco to Burlingame, a suburb some 16 miles to the south of the city. Throughout her childhood, Jackson kept journals and wrote poetry, with existing entries as early as 1932, when she was 13 years old. Although the Jackson family moved to Rochester, New York, when Shirley was 16, the early years in California made a lasting impression. Further, as Oppenheimer points out, Jackson’s early diary entries reveal an “increasing interest in superstition and the supernatural,” with Jackson noting which days are lucky and unlucky and attributing spiritual portents to periods of time (19).

In 1934, soon after moving to Rochester, Jackson enrolled at Syracuse University, where she studied two years before leaving to dedicate her life to writing full time. After a two-year hiatus, Jackson returned to Syracuse in 1938 and graduated in 1940, during which time she published fiction and nonfiction in campus publications and met Stanley Edgar Hyman, with whom she founded a campus magazine called The Specter. This academic partnership continued throughout Jackson’s life; she married Hyman in 1940 and raised a family as Hyman pursued a career as an academic. In the same year, upon graduation, the two moved to New York City, where just one year later Jackson’s first publication of note, a short story based on her experience working at Macy’s department store called “My Life with R. H. Macy,” appeared in the New Republic, the publication for which Hyman served as editorial assistant. Notably, her story “Come Dance with Me in Ireland” was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, 1944. During the five-year period in New York, Jackson continued to publish short stories; gave birth to a son, Laurence; and a daughter, Joanne; and moved to Bennington, Vermont—the academic and spiritual locus Jackson knew the rest of her life—in 1945. Although Hyman and Jackson returned to New York for one year in 1949, and Jackson did publish the story for which she is best known during this significant year when Hyman accepted a post with the New Yorker, Bennington remained their home.

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With Hyman a faculty member at Bennington College, the couple knew many of the leading scholars, editors, and fiction writers of the middle of the 20th century. These include the eminent novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison, and the literary critic Kenneth Burke. During their Bennington tenure, Jackson also worked as a substitute teacher for Hyman’s creative writing course. The Bennington years were fruitful, filled with books and children. The works for which Jackson is best known date from this period: “The Lottery,” was published in the New Yorker on June 28, 1948, and Jackson’s first novel, The Road through the Wall, came out in 1949, in addition to The Lottery, or, The Adventures of James Harris, a collection of short stories that included its title piece. “The Lottery,” a gothic story of a New England town that sacrifices one of its members for the feast of new corn, propelled Jackson to fame; The New Yorker was flooded with letters demanding an explanation for this horror story. Although late in life Jackson would lecture on this strong public reaction and even parody the letters the New Yorker received, she refrained, as do many fiction writers, from making many comments about the purpose and meaning of this dark story. Nevertheless, influential critics continued to comment on her work, perhaps most significantly some 10 years later when Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren used “The Lottery” as a model in their famous work of literary criticism, Understanding Fiction (1959). Throughout the 1950s, Jackson continued to raise children and to write prolifically, turning out short stories, the novels Hangsaman (1951) and The Bird’s Nest (1954)—both portrayals of psychological abnormalities and disturbance—a children’s book, The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956), and short pieces for Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle, many of which were included in Life among the Savages (1953) and Raising Demons (1957). At the end of the decade, Jackson published three novels that garnered much critical acclaim: The Sundial (1962), a gothic suspense tale; The Haunting of Hill House (1959), a ghost story in which a doctor of philosophy seeks to uncover the darkness lurking in a house for 80 years by inviting guests to stay with him in the house; and We Have Always Lived in the Castle

(1962), a story of an agoraphobe and mass-murderess often said to reflect Jackson’s fears and anxieties. In her lecture “Experience and Fiction” collected in Come Along with Me, Jackson describes the genesis for The Haunting of Hill House and for her interest in the supernatural: I have recently finished a novel about a haunted house. I was [working] on a novel about a haunted house because I happened by chance, to read a book about a group of people, nineteenth-century psychic researchers, who rented a haunted house and recorded their impressions of the things they saw and heard and felt in order to contribute a learned paper for the Society for Psychic Research. . . . I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor—most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren’t careful—if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first . . . (201–202)

Such an interest in the occult has led some to label Jackson as a genre writer, but such an interest also conveys a deep awareness of the reading public and in connecting with the popular reader’s imagination, something Jackson strove for throughout her life. Late in her career, Jackson reviewed children’s books for the New York Herald Tribune, continued to write award-winning fiction, taught at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, lectured at schools and universities, and received the Arents Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Achievement from Syracuse University, her alma mater. Although many critics have relegated Jackson’s to being a one-hit-wonder, a horror writer, and the author of domestic memoirs, Jackson’s work is currently being reassessed, especially in terms of its

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universal appeal and social significance. One such reassessment is Jonathan Lethem’s 1997 Salon review of Just an Ordinary Day, a posthumous collection of Jackson’s works published by two of her children:

Hague insists, Her artful use of ambiguity and understatement has obscured the cultural critique her writing presents, and it is time to approach her work with the same critical rigor that recently has been expended on other overlooked and unappreciated—and sometimes less talented—writers. Rather than being relegated to the obligatory inclusion of “The Lottery” in undergraduate literature textbooks, her fiction should be read as a significant contribution to our understanding of the psychic disruption that has characterized postwar experience. Her “faithful anatomy” deserves a closer look. (90–91)

To put it most simply, Shirley Jackson wrote about the mundane evils hidden in everyday life and about the warring and subsuming of selves in a family, a community and sometimes even in a single mind. She wrote about prejudice, neurosis and identity. An unfortunate impression persists (one Jackson encouraged, for complicated reasons) that her work is full of ghosts and witches. In truth, few of her greatest stories and just one of her novels, “The Haunting of Hill House,” contain a suggestion of genuinely supernatural events. Jackson’s forté was psychology and society, people in other words—people disturbed, dispossessed, misunderstanding or thwarting one another compulsively, people colluding absently in monstrous acts. She had a jeweler’s eye for the microscopic degrees by which a personality creeps into madness or a relationship turns from dependence to exploitation.

As a writer who captured the imagination of postwar Americans with the “The Lottery,” wrote on both domestic life and the nature of human evil in varied forms that range from the darkly pessimistic to the light and comic, depicted the individual as object of the social world’s inhuman rituals, and recorded the chilling aspects of the human psyche, Shirley Jackson will not likely be forgotten.

Most recently, Angela Hague (2005) has reconsidered Jackson’s writings in light of the condition of mid 20th-century American women:

“The Lottery” (1948)

By focusing on her female characters’ isolation, loneliness, and fragmenting identities, their simultaneous inability to relate to the world outside themselves or to function autonomously, and their confrontation with an inner emptiness that often results in mental illness, Jackson displays in pathological terms the position of many women in the 1950s. But her unveiling of this era’s dark corners is not limited to one gender, for her apocalyptic consciousness, sinister children, and scathing portraits of nuclear families and their suburban environments, her depiction of a quotidian and predictable world that can suddenly metamorphose into the terrifying and the bizarre, reveal her characters’ reactions to a culture of repression, containment, and paranoia. (74)

In an age where lottery denotes legal gambling in the form of a public competition, often with scratch-off playing cards and ping-pong machines that mix numbered balls into winning combinations, the significance of Shirley Jackson’s short story title may easily be lost. While “casting lots” is mentioned in the Bible and door-prize drawings existed in ancient Rome, modern lottery competitions date back to 17th-century Europe. Jackson’s account, however, is both ironic and also macabre. An account of a yearly corn-planting ritual in which the winner of a chance drawing is stoned to death, “The Lottery” initially baffled readers when it appeared in the June 26, 1948, issue of the New Yorker. In fact, the story elicited so many letters inquiring about its meaning that Jackson lampooned the letters in a satirical lecture, “Biography of a Story,” which later appeared in Come Along

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with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures (1959). Many critics deal with the story as a kind of anthropological treatise on scapegoating, with the one who is stoned taking on the sins of the society as a means of expiation. Further, since Helen E. Nebeker’s March 1974 essay, “‘The Lottery’: Symbolic Tour de Force,’” many critics have focused on the story’s symbolism, the way virtually every detail in the story can be said to signify something meaningful, something hinting at a large story behind the story, an allegory that might unlock what Jackson intended. While such cat-and-mouse games make up much literary criticism, Jackson’s defense of the story probably says more about readers’ need for closure and explication than anything Jackson intended. For Jackson, in her many defenses to her editors and to the many audiences that listened to her speak about the story, contended that “The Lottery” was written quickly and easily, and that, while there might be many possibilities for interpreting it, as readers and critics have speculated over the years, she did not intend them: Things began mildly enough with a note from a friend at The New Yorker: “Your story has kicked up quite a fuss around the office,” he wrote. I was flattered; it’s nice to think that your friends notice what you write. Later that day there was a call from one of the magazine’s editors; they had had a couple of people phone in about my story, he said, and was there anything I particularly wanted him to say if there were more calls? No, I said, nothing particular; anything he chose to say was perfectly all right with me; it was just a story.” (Come Along with Me 212)

Whether Jackson intended for readers to stew over this classic American horror tale or not, readers and critics continue to vie for interpretive mastery of the story. Perhaps what the story precisely means is ultimately unimportant. What is important is that the story, in its strangeness, has led generations to question its purpose, ponder its meaning, and to come up with myriad ways of understanding its significance. Rather than tell us what we are to think, “The Lot-

tery” show us human beings caught up in a deadly game, one that mirrors the many social rituals that define much of our lives.

For Discussion or Writing 1. From one perspective, “The Lottery” deals with tradition, those customs and rituals handed down that we hold as vital and often perform routinely and without thinking. Such American traditions include the rituals of organized religions of varying denominations, New Orleans’s Mardi Gras celebration of carnival, the Indy 500, and a host of “reality” television shows that reward some and disenfranchise others. Incorporating several American traditions, write a well-developed essay on the use and abuse of tradition in “The Lottery” and in American society. 2. Write a well-developed essay on the role of women in the story and the implications of gender roles in the story. Be sure to consider the sociological context of the 1940s and 1950s as you discuss a central idea about Jackson’s representation of gender in the story.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON JACKSON AND HER WORK 1. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s 1982 memoir, King sums up what he sees as the significance of the horror genre and Shirley Jackson’s use of it: The horror film is an invitation to indulge in deviant, antisocial behavior by proxy—to commit gratuitous acts of violence, indulge our puerile dreams of power, to give into our most craven fears. Perhaps more than anything else, the horror story or horror movie says its OK to join the mob, to become the total tribal being, to destroy the outsider. It has never been done better or more literally than in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery,” where the entire concept of the outsider is symbolic, created by nothing more than a black circle colored on a slip of paper.

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Write an essay on the role of the outsider in “The Lottery” that supports King’s thesis. 2. The American writer Stephen King has said that Jackson’s The Sundial was one of his inspirations when writing The Shining. First, read Jackson’s The Sundial and then read The Shining with Jackson’s work in mind. Finally, write an essay in which you compare and contrast the two works. 3. To date, two adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House have been filmed: a universally acclaimed production in 1963 and a universally panned production in 1999. First, read The Haunting of Hill House. Then, view both productions. Finally, write a well-developed essay that argues which film is the more accurate representation of Jackson’s work. WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Bellman, Samuel Irving, “Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction,” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 282–293. Bloom, Harold. Shirley Jackson: Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 2001. Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. Hague, Angela. “‘A Faithful Anatomy of Our Times’: Reassessing Shirley Jackson.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 2 (2005): 73–96. Hall, Joan. Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Hubbard, Kristen. The Works of Shirley Jackson. Available online. URL: http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ ENG-jkh. Accessed July 21, 2009. Hyman, Laurence J., and S. H. Stewart, eds. Just an Ordinary Day. New York: Bantam Books, 1997. Hyman, Stanley Edgar, ed. Come Along With Me. New York: Viking, 1968. ———. The Promised End. New York: World, 1963. Jackson, Shirley. Come Along with Me: Part of a Novel, Sixteen Stories, and Three Lectures. Edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Penguin, 1995. ———. Shirley Jackson: A Register of Her Papers in the Library of Congress. Library of Congress. Available online URL: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ query/h?faid/faid:@field(DOCID+ms996001. Accessed June 4, 2009. ———. The Magic of Shirley Jackson. Edited by Stanley Edgar Hyman. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1966. Lethem, Jonathan. “Monstrous Acts and Little Murders.” Review of Just an Ordinary Day. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/ jan97/jackson970106.html. Accessed June 4, 2009. Murphy, Bernice. Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy. Jefferson N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2005. Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam, 1988.

Blake Hobby

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) Everybody understands that poems and stories are written by memory and desire, love and hatred, daydreams and nightmares—by a being, not a brain. (“The Age of Criticism”)

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he bushy salt-and-pepper beard and soulful eyes in Randall Jarrell’s later photographs portray the scholarly and artistic wisdom he accumulated during a life of writing and teaching. Unfortunately, Jarrell died at the premature age of 51. One of the leading critics of his age, Jarrell often wrote witty and at times bitter reviews that delighted some readers and angered others. Jarrell’s sharp insight and keen intelligence as a teacher, poet, literary critic, translator, editor, and author of children’s books were tethered to childlike hopes and fears that chased him in his personal life and drove him to fi nd answers through his art. Jarrell’s early years were marked by an insecurity and sadness that plagued him through his adulthood. This profound sorrow can be felt in poems such as “90 North” (1940), “Next Day” (1942), and The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960). Throughout his life Jarrell would attempt to describe, resolve, and rise above the underlying emotional flatness that characterized both his childhood and his adulthood. With great sensitivity and an often dark outlook on life, he wrote about childhood, war, illness, animals, books, loneliness, and, above all, loss: lost children, lost love, lost lives, and a lost world. On May 6, 1914, just two months before the outbreak of World War I, Randall Jarrell was born. Jarrell’s family moved from Nashville, Tennessee, to his paternal grandparents’ home in California when he was just a year old. His parents separated in 1925;

Jarrell stayed with his beloved grandparents before returning to Nashville to live with his mother. During the time that Jarrell stayed with his father’s parents and his great-grandmother in California, he wrote pain-filled letters to his mother in Nashville. Late in life his mother returned these letters, and they formed the basis for “The Lost World” and “Thinking of the Lost World” (1965). We can see the persistent loneliness of his childhood through the speaker and themes in poems such as “The Lost World” (1962), where “Mama” and “Pop” represent his grandparents and “Anna” his mother. He also returned to his youth in a series of children’s books he wrote, including The Bat-Poet (1964) and The Animal Family (1965), which was dedicated to his beloved cat. When Jarrell moved back to Nashville at age 12, his mother worked as an English teacher, and her brother, Howell Campbell, helped support his nephews. Randall was a gifted student who did well at Hume-Hogg High School, where he contributed to the school’s yearbook, The Echo. During this time he enjoyed open access to one of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s libraries in Nashville. This early love of libraries would find full expression between 1956 and 1958 when Jarrell accepted the post of consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, and in a number of his “library” poems including “Carnegie Library, Juvenile Division” (1942). Thanks to the generous patronage of his uncle, Howell Campbell, Jarrell attended nearby Vanderbilt

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University in 1932 and completed his undergraduate degree in 1935, taking classes during summer sessions at George Peabody College. Graduating with a degree in psychology, Jarrell integrated Sigmund Freud’s theories into the themes of his poetry, which foreshadowed his future emotional struggles. His time at Vanderbilt would influence the course of his work and friendships for the rest of his life, especially his connection with the professor, poet, and Rhodes scholar John Crowe Ransom. While at Vanderbilt, Jarrell edited a humor magazine, The Masquerader, which also published works by his teachers, including Ransom, Allen Tate, and the future Rhodes scholar and Pulitzer Prize winner ROBERT PENN WARREN (All the King’s Men 1946). The first of Jarrell’s 35 poems published between 1934 and 1940, “Five Poems,” was included in the American Review, a journal published by the American fascist Seward Collins; the journal also published works by Warren, Ransom, and Tate. This group of Jarrell’s mentors, who were not fascists and did not support Hitler or nazism, cofounded and edited one of Vanderbilt’s most influential publications, the Fugitive, in which they examined southern life in their poetry and essays. Later they joined with nine other academics to contribute essays to the conservative antimodernist manifesto I’ll Take My Stand (1930), which provided an alternative to what they warned was the destruction of southern culture by industrialization. Despite the encouragement and inspiration the southern agrarians and fugitive poets provided, Jarrell showed little interest in southern political and cultural ideas. Jarrell continued with graduate studies at Vanderbilt and planned on writing his master’s thesis on the poetry of the 30-year-old W. H. Auden. Donald Davidson, however, another fugitive poet and contributor to I’ll Take My Stand, advised him to write about a more established and less contemporary poet, A. E. Houseman. In 1937, when Robert Frost recommended John Crowe Ransom to the president of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, Ransom left Vanderbilt despite Jarrell’s and other students’ protests. At Kenyon, Ransom served as professor of poetry and as founding editor of a distinguished and influential literary publication, the Kenyon Review.

Jarrell and Tate left Vanderbilt to follow Ransom to Kenyon College, where Jarrell’s political poem “The Winter’s Tale” was included in one of the Kenyon Review’s earliest issues (1940). At Kenyon, Randall taught English part-time, coached sports, and completed his thesis, “Implicit Generalization in Houseman,” which earned his master’s degree in English from Vanderbilt in 1938. ROBERT LOWELL, a rising, though emotionally erratic young poet, left his own undergraduate studies at Harvard to study under Ransom at Vanderbilt. Lowell and Randall became lifelong friends and collaborators after rooming together at Ransom’s house, later befriending a fiction writer who would become Jarrell’s best friend, Peter Taylor (A Summons to Memphis, 1985 Pulitzer Prize). These friendships survived world war, mental illness, and divorces, eventually inspiring a collection of posthumous tributes to Jarrell edited by Lowell, Taylor, and Warren. While Jarrell was at Kenyon College, his girlfriend at Vanderbilt, Amy Breyer, unexpectedly ended their relationship and married a young surgeon. The emotional fallout of that troubled relationship and the abrupt breakup inspired numerous poems, such as “On the Railway Platform” (1940). When Robert Penn Warren joined another fugitive poet, Cleanth Brooks, on the faculty of Louisiana State University’s English Department, Warren and Brooks published Jarrell’s poetry in the Southern Review (1934), in which Jarrell also won a poetry contest in 1935. After completing his master’s degree, Jarrell accepted a position at the University of Texas in Austin, where he met his first wife, Mackie Langham, a member of the English Department. They married in 1940, the same year a collection of 20 previously unpublished poems, “The Rage for the Lost Penny,” appeared in Five Young American Poets. Jarrell published his first book of poems, Blood for a Stranger (1942), at the age of 28 just prior to his enlistment in the army. Dedicated to his former professor, Allen Tate, the collection included “A Picture in the Paper,” “For an Emigrant,” “A Story,” and “The Refugees.” The collection was also reproduced in the New York Times with a complimentary review: “There is shown not only sensitivity and talent, but that power of

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working at his art which is one of the signs of a real poet” (1942). Though Jarrell was unable to fly for the air force, he was ultimately deployed to an Army Air Corps base in Arizona, where he served as a celestial navigation training operator for B-29 pilots until 1946. During his four years of military service Jarrell wrote to his wife daily and corresponded regularly with Lowell, Taylor, and Tate, often chronicling army life and his views on the politics of war. In 1945 he also published his second collection of poems, Little Friend, Little Friend, which distinguished him as a noteworthy American war poet. Influenced by Wilfred Owens and Siegfried Sassoon, British poets of World War I, Jarrell depicted the horrors of war in such poems as “Losses,” “Protocols,” “Second Air Force,” and “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—his most famous poem. After he was discharged from military service, Jarrell taught for one year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. In 1946 he won the Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, enabling him to concentrate solely on writing during 1948 and 1949. During that time, Taylor invited him to join him on the faculty of the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina (now University of North Carolina at Greensboro [UNCG]). Jarrell remained on the faculty at UNCG for the remainder of his life, also serving as a visiting professor at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Cincinnati. In 1948 Jarrell published a second collection of war poetry, Losses, and in 1951 published The Seven-League Crutches. In the summer of that year, while at a writers’ conference at the University of Colorado, Jarrell met Mary von Schrader, who would become his wife and intellectual partner in 1952, just days after his divorce from Mackie. Influenced by the method that Jarrell’s mentors established to evaluate their own poetry during their weekly discussion groups, Jarrell learned to read and analyze literature closely. This method of close reading later became known as the New Criticism. Yet Jarrell distanced himself from this critical school in his own artful literary criticism. Compiling essays he had previously published in literary journals edited by his former mentors, Jarrell published them as Poetry and the Age (1953). Through these essays he

gained recognition as a brilliant and accomplished literary critic. In 1961 Jarrell received the National Book Award in poetry for his autobiographical The Woman at the Washington Zoo. A final book of poetry, The Lost World, about lost childhood, was published in 1965. Jarrell’s lone piece of prose fiction, Pictures from an Institution, a satire of academic life loosely based on his time at Sarah Lawrence College, was published in 1951. His literary life included the publication of numerous works of literary criticism, translations, fairy tales, and children’s stories that earned him the Levinson Prize (1948), Oscar Blumenthal Prize (1951), O. Max Gardner Award (1962), and Ingram-Merrill Literary Award (1962). He also edited prestigious literary publications including the Yale Review. Doubts remain over the circumstances of Randall Jarrell’s death on 14 October 1965. The New York Times printed a North Carolina state trooper’s statement that “witnesses reported that the victim had ‘lunged into the side of the car that struck him.’ ‘We are going on the assumption that it was suicide’” (20). Despite this initial report, his death was ultimately ruled as accidental. During his fi nal year, Jarrell experienced a series of health-related problems that resulted in medication changes. These changes caused personality aberrations ranging from hyperelation to depression, for which he was hospitalized. He returned home in July 1964 to resume teaching and planned trips abroad and future literary and critical works. As Jarrell walked home alone along a rural highway in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on October 14, 1965, the life of the beloved teacher, gifted critic, and talented poet was tragically cut short.

“90 North” (1942) Jarrell’s first independent book of poems, Blood for a Stranger, included the dark and pain-filled poem “90 North,” a poem about a boy’s dream to trek to the North Pole and a man’s reluctance to return from the top of the world. The collection came out the same year he enlisted in the air force and was published after a selection of his poems (“The Rage

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for the Lost Penny”) debuted in 1940. As suggested by the title, which refers to the latitude of the North Pole, the setting takes on an important role in telling the story of loneliness and isolation. Similarly, Jarrell relied on important settings in the concentration camp poem “Protocols,” and in the hot desert poem “Second Air Force.” In “90 North,” the setting is the coldest, darkest, loneliest, harshest place on Earth. A child and an adult speaker alternately express the loneliness and pain of the troubled 26-year-old poet. For the child, who speaks first, the North Pole is a magical world, a place of happiness, joy, and adventure. The child climbs into bed, drifts off to sleep, and dreams. When he meets challenges on his expedition, he wakes from his dream and returns to the comfort of his bed “in [his] flannel gown” (1). The adult speaker has no such retreat, however, and encounters a spinning world where all lines and winds converge in a meaningless whirlpool. With no means to escape his nightmare, the adult speaker says, “Turn as I please, my step is to the south” (13). In the next stanza the speaker’s death is foretold: “the flakes came huddling, / Were they really my end?” (7–8). Here, the child and adult worlds overlap. The speaker gives a short, childlike reason for leaving behind the nightmare of starving, freezing, and suffocating: “In the darkness I turned to my rest” (8). However, to the adult speaker who understands the effects of hyperthermia, “to my rest” is the resigned slip into unconsciousness before life’s final rest. Stephen Burt notes that the child speaker learns a valuable lesson: “Jarrell’s [child] dreamer expected sublimity and wisdom from a summit, but learns instead that he must go back down” (23). For the speaker the experience yields no wisdom. In the famous last line’s defiant declaration, the weathered speaker laments that the experience did not provide the knowledge he sought. Instead, “It is pain” he discovers.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Jarrell provides two different speakers with different perspectives about the issues presented in “90 North.” How do these two speakers differ? Why does Jarrell provide two speakers? What effect does this have?

2. Compare this poem with Jarrell’s later work “Well Water,” one of his final poems. How does he define meaning in each? If one were to extrapolate a vision of what is real from the poems, how would the two poems differ? With all of this in mind, can you say that Jarrell’s worldview changed, or was it static? 3. For many philosophers, the key to life’s meaning lies in suffering and how we respond to it. On one level, this poem deals with the nature of suffering and its meaning. In fact, one might be able to arrive at an explanation of our lives from the poem. What philosophy of life does this poem suggest? What would the consequences of living such a life be?

“Losses” (1945) “Losses” was published in Jarrell’s second collection of poetry, Little Friend, Little Friend, which takes it name from a haunting transcript of the radio communication between the crews of air force planes. In this transcript larger bomber planes are referred to as Big Friend, while smaller fighter planes are called Little Friend. During the exchange, “The bomber had both engines on fi re when it called out to the fighter, ‘Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two engines on fi re. Can you see me, Little Friend?’ To which the fighter responded, ‘I’m crossing right over you. Let’s go home’ ” (3). Jarrell does not use the voice of innocence to convey a simpler and more optimistic view of life, as with the child in “90 North,” but to capture the naïve experiences of boys who “burned the cities [they] had learned about in school” (22–23). Jarrell does not provide carefully constructed graphic details to recreate the horrors of war, as Wilfred Owen did in poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1921). The speaker of Jarrell’s poem, a collective group of soldiers, has nothing but high school to compare death with; the soldiers die not in foreign trenches fi lled with bloody corpses, but “on the wrong page of the almanac” (6). Jarrell used common everyday language throughout his career to reveal the deepest understandings of

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human experience. “Losses” is narrated by a group of soldiers who liken their deaths not to those of heroic figures, but to the mundane passing of “aunts or pets or foreigners” (10). In this way the dead soldiers speak for themselves, much like the anonymous and departed speaker of Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945) does. In the first line of the poem, the speaker trivializes death when he says, “we had died before,” as if death were commonplace (emphasis added, 2) which, of course, in wartime it was. The soldiers’ deaths are minimized further when the speaker relates such routine tasks as writing home to parents and reading mail. By juxtaposing these everyday events with the soldiers’ deaths, Jarrell reiterates the speaker’s naïveté. Yet in the poem’s final stanza, the speaker dreams of being asked by a destroyed city “‘But why did I die?’” (32). The city questions its death, but the soldiers never do. The speaker maintains, “It was not dying—no, not ever dying,” a line that reflects the soldier’s naïveté and inability to understand the horrors of war (29).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the many ways that Jarrell employs repetition throughout the poem. What is the effect of these repetitions? Do you find them to be effective, distracting, or confusing? Why do you think this thoughtful writer used so many repetitions? How do the repetitions contribute to the poem’s meaning and form? 2. Read Jarrell’s “Eighth Air Force” and then compare/contrast that poem with “Losses.” What do the two say about youth? About soldiers? About war? 3. Compare T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with Jarrell’s poem. What do the two have in common? How do they differ? 4. Eliot’s The Four Quartets was inspired by war experiences, just as Jarrell’s poem was, and reflects on the meaning of life from the perspective of death. Read the fi nal Eliot quartet, “Little Gidding,” and compare Jarrell’s take on loss with Eliot’s. Finally, write a well-developed essay that compares/contrasts the two, noting especially how the two poets think about life’s meaning and purpose.

“Protocols” (1945) “Protocols,” as do many of Jarrell’s poems, employs speakers who are trapped. Like the speaker of “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” the two speakers of “Protocols,” innocent and vulnerable, are awaiting death, describing its approach in an impressionistic manner. Both poems are examples of how Jarrell juxtaposes the naïveté of youth with the morbid disillusionment we have known since we learned of the “final solution.” Jarrell uses this discontinuity between persona and theme to create a vision of the world where birth and death intertwine, a world where lived experience is tragically short. As in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” anonymous speakers reveal themselves as victims of the Holocaust at the end of “Protocols.” This time, though, Jarrell’s speakers are vulnerable children who represent the helplessness of the downtrodden at the whim of global powers. In a letter to Robert Lowell, Jarrell wrote, “If you’ll notice, I’ve never written a poem about myself in the army or war, unless you’re vain or silly you realize that you, except insofar as you’re exactly in the same boat as the others, aren’t the primary subject of any sensible writing about the war” (quoted in Goldman 194). Unlike the soldier in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” who reveals his gruesome death, these child speakers do not know the dangers of the “water in a pipe” (9), the death-camp shower pipe with its fatal gas. The poem’s two children might represent the naïveté of European Jews, who did not see the evil threatening them, or, more generally, of the entire world, which was also caught unaware and in denial. The two child speakers remain unknown, anonymous, and representative of the concentration camp victims at Birkenau and Odessa. Their recollections bleed into one another as they narrate fragments of their respective journeys to the gas chamber and the showers. Their pregnant observations from the grave are immediate, and deceptively simple. Jarrell’s metaphor for facing death, “The water there is deeper than the world. . . . And the water drank me,” is profoundly cynical, devoid of meaning, a lack, at once grotesque in its depiction, at the same time the poem is imagistic. In this way, the reader experiences a sense of disconnection between the beauty and sim-

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plicity of the images and the horror of the events taking place. As with the speakers, so also is the reader confined, trapped, in a narrow interpretive space, yet incapable of feeling any sense of resolution.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read two other Jarrell poems that have child speakers: “The Truth” and “We Are Seven.” Having read these two, compare the speakers in all three. Write an essay that first classifies the three speakers and assesses their role in helping the poem to be understood: How do these speakers engage the reader? 2. Read two poems of SYLVIA PLATH, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” both of which contain Holocaust references. Then, compare the way Plath represents and uses the Holocaust with the way Jarrell represents and uses it in “Protocols.” What do these two poets have in common? How do they differ? 3. Read Elie Wiesel’s Night, a short novel about the Holocaust that tells the story of a child who survives the death camp Auschwitz. Then, compare/ contrast Night with “Protocols.” What do the two have in common? What differences can you find? How do the two authors’ perspectives differ? Why do they differ? 4. Visit one of the Web sites regarding the Holocaust and look for stories about the children of the concentration camp. Then, evaluate Jarrell’s poem. How does it compare with the accounts you have read? How does it differ? Why might a poem be a more effective way to communicate such events than the narrative accounts you have read? Decide ultimately whether Jarrell is successful at what he is trying to accomplish.

“Second Air Force” (1945) This portrayal of a mother visiting an airfield after the death of her son during the war is another example of how women play an important role in Jarrell’s poetry. They represent the fragility and ineffectualness of the universal mother in protecting her children as seen in works like “Protocols.” They serve as narrators of

empty modern living in The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Jarrell also uses women’s voices in “developing a socially respectable way of coming to terms with his own divided sensibility” (Longenbach 50). “Well Water,” published in 1965, features a female speaker musing about the meaning of life while drawing water from a rusty pump. “Second Air Force,” included in Little Friend, Little Friend, captures the despair of all the loved ones left behind to grieve by depicting one mother’s grief over the death of her own son. A man’s overt expressions of such vulnerabilities during a time of war would not elicit the same kind of sympathy afforded to mothers anticipating the return of their sons. In his letters, Jarrell stated, “The mother is merely a vehicle of presentation, her situation merely a formal connection of the out-of-this-world field with the world” (quoted in Letters 132). If the subject had been a man, maintaining this distance might seem appropriate, but by standing so “far off” (1) from a mother, the reader participates in the woman’s isolation. More tragically, the woman is further distanced from her son by viewing surroundings unfamiliar to her but intimately familiar to her son before his untimely death. In achieving this distance, Jarrell employs “the Wordsworthian and Keatsean dramatic lyric, wherein the speaker and landscape are interdependent” (Beck 69). The landscape provides the tone of desolation and expansive emptiness. In the first line “the plain,” with its imagined expanse, renders the woman small against the enormity of war and the powers that took her son. In the second line, another reference to the landscape shows the degree to which war changes the natural order of things: Artificial hangars appear like “hills,” and “bubbling asphalt” (8) interrupts the “sage,” “the dunes,” and the “ranges” (9). With Jarrell’s reference, once again, to the story of Little Friend, the bomber’s fighter escort, the elements in nature, to which every person can relate, are anthropomorphized and “[flames] eat, [the plane] rib by rib” (40). The plane is made human, and the bomber’s life, not the crew’s lives, “stream[s] out” (42).

For Discussion or Writing 1. What does the mother mean when she says, “The years meant this?” Why is this line significant?

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2. Search the Internet for accounts of bomber and fighter pilots from World War II and examine “Second Air Force” and “Eighth Air Force” for details they have in common with actual accounts. In what ways would the details in and tone of “Second Air Force” need to be amended to give a more positive representation of an air force base?

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945) The last of the poems in Little Friend, Little Friend is perhaps Jarrell’s most well known, a poem horrifying in its simplicity. Jarrell added his own note of explanation for the ball turret: A ball turret was a Plexiglas sphere set into the belly of a B-17 or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine-guns and one man, a short small man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with the turret; hunched upsidedown in his little sphere, he looked like the foetus in the womb. The fighters which attacked him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells. The hose was a steam hose. (Jarrell’s note)

In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” a soldierchild narrates his own shattering death in the style of a journalist relating an everyday event. It is strewn with carefully crafted references to motherhood, childhood, birth, dreams, and death—recurrent themes throughout Jarrell’s poetry. Each image tells multiple and easily recognizable stories. The reference to “wet fur” (2), also present in “90 North” and referred to as “wired fur” in another poem from this collection, “Second Air Force,” is filled with multiple meanings. With nature representing life, Jarrell uses the image of the wet fur found on blind and dependent newborn animals to convey the vulnerability and helplessness of the gunner. Premature babies are also often covered in downy hair, suggesting that this soldier was ill prepared to enter the world created by the state. On a more literal level, Air Corps personnel wore jackets with fur collars that often became wet

with sweat. Jarrell takes this frightened young soldier on a journey above the earth, not into a dreamlike place in the clouds, but away from it; not awakening from a nightmare, but awakening to it. This progression, though horrifyingly sudden, startles the speaker with the recognition that his insignificant life is over. The brutality of the last line is created not just by the image of the soldier’s remains—remains that could be so unceremoniously washed down a drain with a common hose—but also by the abrupt change from two lyrical lines of imagery, lines that could just as easily have taken the story in a heroic direction but instead move to a staccato and sickening end. Jarrell told the story of the gunner in a longer, less brutal, and more detailed poem, “Siegfried,” which also appeared in Little Friend, Little Friend.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read a number of Wilfred Owen’s and Siegfried Sassoon’s World War I poems, which can be found on the Internet in a number of places, including http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/projects/jtap/ tutorials/intro/. If you explore this site, you will find full texts and actual copies of manuscripts in the poet’s hand, such as the Owen’s manuscripts found here: http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/ warpoems.htm. Next, read Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and his poem “Siegfried.” Examine how Jarrell’s poetry differs from the poetry of the two World War I poets. Which aspects have been retained? Why do you think the poetry about these two wars differs? 2. Though it was one of his more famous poems, Jarrell did not think it among his best. Knowing what you do about his life and other poetry, discuss why he might have felt this way.

“Next Day” (1965) As many of Jarrell’s poems do, “Next Day” contrasts the universal themes of death and dying with a routine, daily experience: an aging woman’s visit to the grocery store a day after her friend’s death. The tone is softer when compared with that of his early work, especially the ferocity of the speaker in “90 North”

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after he realizes that wisdom, though promised, can never be possessed. “Next Day” also deals with themes of wisdom and knowledge. In the poem’s first line, Jarrell lures the reader away from any grand themes with names of ordinary household cleaners: Cheer, Joy, All. Immediately thereafter, however, the speaker quotes the American psychologist and philosopher William James, brother of the famous writer Henry James: “Wisdom, said William James, / Is learning what to overlook” (6–7). This reference does not seem in keeping with Jarrell’s desire to write for the common reader, “and not for the more specialized audience that reads modern poetry” (Kipling, Auden, and Co. 170). In the Washington Post, Karl Shapiro, a fellow World War II poet and publisher of Jarrell’s works, praised Jarrell’s ability to capture the voice of common people and his refusal to “surrender his intelligence and his education to the undergraduate mentality” (quoted in Colum 1942). The speaker’s elevated syntax, however, allows readers to experience her own regret: Long, lyrical sentences mirror the inner wanderings of a woman trying to piece together a new life from old memories. Jarrell does not, however, let her continue unchecked. In the middle of the second stanza, the real world intrudes—“the boy takes it to my station wagon”—pulling both speaker and reader back to a safe intellectual distance (10). The woman laments the unfulfilled dreams of her youth and states her current crisis: “Now that I’m old, my wish / Is womanish: / That the boy putting groceries in my car / See me” (16–19). Again, in multisyllabic words and complex sentences, the woman drifts off to remember even more vividly what she was like when she was young. In a reminiscent style of Shakespearean wordplay, in which the same word is repeated in the same line with a different meaning, Jarrell writes, “And, holding their flesh within my flesh” to express that the feelings of the woman and her admirers seem to have been mutual (24). The line “Their vile imaginings within my imagining,” however, implies that perhaps it was all in her mind, after all, and not in the desires of others. Just as she approaches an understanding of this mirrorlike quality, two short sentences of single-syllable words snap her back to her

reality—“now the boy pets my dog / and we start home” (27–28).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden and then compare it with Jarrell’s “Next Day.” Think especially about the two speakers’ reactions to the death of a friend. Consider the primary focus of the speakers and the ways in which their outlooks on life change as a result of their friend’s death. 2. Jarrell writes the poem from a woman’s perspective. Why does he make this deliberate choice, and how does this choice affect our understanding of the poem? Is his feminine voice successful? Why or why not?

“Well Water” (1965) By the time Jarrell reached the last years of his life, his poetry had a less bitter tone; he had become resigned, comfortable, even understanding. Less dark and more melancholy than in early works on the same theme, “Well Water” is an elegantly simple description of a woman pumping water from a rusty pump. It was written during the same year that Jarrell received the National Book Award for The Woman at the Washington Zoo and was included in the final book of poems published just prior to his death, The Lost World (1965). In this poem Jarrell appears to have begun to understand that though there may not be a higher meaning in life, one must savor, “gulp,” meaning from the “‘dailiness of life’” (l. 13). The works of W. H. Auden, William Wordsworth, and Robert Frost influenced Jarrell to focus on a common object, the “rusty pump” (ll. 10–11), and use ordinary language to examine a universal truth about the human condition, in this case, aging. He includes a piece of ordinary dialogue, “‘since you’re up . . .” (l. 3), to help readers relate to the significance he explains explicitly as “Making you a means to / A means to a means to” (ll. 4–5). Jarrell turns to the example of one of his favorite poets, Walt Whitman, employing simple elements from nature to express the tender melancholia of old hands cupping to capture the essence of life. The girl, who calls her task

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of drawing water the “dailiness of life,” captures the goal of poets since William Wordsworth, “to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them . . . tracing in them . . . the primary laws of our nature” (Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Contrast the two ways of experiencing time the poem describes. 2. Read Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do,” from her collection of the same title. Next compare the Howe poem with “Well Water.” What do both poems have in common? What challenges do they both present?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON JARRELL AND HIS WORK 1. Both Randall Jarrell’s “Thinking of the Lost World” and Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” deal with “nothing,” a poetic metaphor that can signify many things. With both poems and nothingness in mind, what comparisons can you make? From the comparisons you find, evaluate whether Stevens’s poem was a source of inspiration for Jarrell’s. Why or why not? 2. Write an essay that compares how war is treated in Jarrell’s poems and in the following poems: Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Karen Gershon’s “Home,” and Joy Kogawa’s “Hiroshima Exit.” What techniques, images, and points of view do these poets share? How do they differ? 3. The friends and colleagues Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and ELIZABETH BISHOP are often grouped together in any discussion of the transition from modernist to postmodernist poetry in the United States. Using a trustworthy Internet site or an encyclopedia, fi rst learn about literary modernism. After you have an idea of what modernist works are like, analyze how Jarrell departs from this tradition. Why can his poems be said to be transitional poems between modernism and postmod-

ernism? Choose examples that best reveal his departure from the modernist conventions of his mentors, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Marianne Moore. 4. Trace Jarrell’s use of different speakers including women, children, and soldiers, from his earliest poems such as “90 North” to his later works published just before his death in 1965. What purpose do these speakers serve? How do they change over time? In what ways do they express the poet’s own life experiences and/or challenges? 5. Read Randall Jarrell’s criticism published in literary journals, the literary sections of newspapers, or his collections of essays. Write an essay in which you critique a Jarrell poem using the same approach he took to literary criticism. What would Jarrell the critic write about Jarrell the poet? WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Beck, Charlotte H. “Randall Jarrell’s Modernism: The Sweet Uses of Personae.” South Atlantic Review 50, no. 2 (May 1985): 67–75. Bryant, J. A., Jr. Understanding Randall Jarrell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986. Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Colum, Mary M. “The New Books of Poetry.” New York Times (1857–Current file), 1 November 1942, p. BR8. Ferguson, Suzanne. Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell, & Co: Middle-Generation Poets in Context. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Flynn, Richard. Randall Jarrell and the Lost World of Children. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Goldman, Mark I. “The Politics of Poetry: Randall Jarrell’s War.” South Atlantic Quarterly 86, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 123–134. Jarrell, Mary von S., ed. Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Jarrell, Randall. The Animal Family. Decorations by Maurice Sendak. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. ———. The Bat-Poet. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: HarperCollins, 1964.

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———. Blood for A Stranger. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942. ———. Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. ———. Fly by Night. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976. ———. Kipling, Auden, and Co. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980. ———. The Letters of Randall Jarrell. Edited by Mary von S. Jarrell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. ———. Little Friend, Little Friend. New York: Dial, 1945. ———. The Lost World. New York: Macmillan, 1965. ———. Manuscripts and papers at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. ———. Manuscripts and papers at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. ———. Manuscripts and papers in the Poetry Consultant archive of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. ———. No Other Book. Edited by Brad Leithauser. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. ———. Pictures from an Institution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ———. Poetry and the Age. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. ———. A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays and Fables. New York: Atheneum, 1962. ———. The Third Book of Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. ———. “Two Poems.” Southern Review 1, no. 1 (July 1935): 84–86.

Longenbach, James. “Randall Jarrell’s Semifeminine Mind.” Southwest Review 81, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 368–386. Lowell, Robert, Peter Taylor, and Robert Penn Warren, eds. Randall Jarrell 1914–1965. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. Prefaces and Prologues. Vol. 39. The Harvard Classics. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby. com, 2001. Available online. URL: www.bartleby. com/39/. Accessed June 29, 2006. Pritchard, William H. Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. Quinn, Sister Bernetta. Randall Jarrell. Boston: Twayne, 1981. “Randall Jarrell, Poet, Killed by Car in Carolina.” New York Times: Special to the New York Times. 15 October 1965. Available online. URL: http://www. nytimes.com/books/99/08/01/specials/jarrellobit.html. Accessed June 25, 2006. “Randall Jarrell 1914–1965.” Available online. URL: http://personal.georgiasouthern.edu/~rflynn/ JarrellHomepage.html. Accessed March 25, 2009. Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: The Four Texts. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth. London: Penguin, 1995. Wright, Stuart. Randall Jarrell: A Descriptive Bibliography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986.

Elizabeth Igarza

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” (On the Road)

T

he New York Times obituary read, “Jack Kerouac, Novelist, Dead; Father of the Beat Generation.” By the time he died on October 21, 1969, Kerouac’s name had become synonymous with a social and cultural movement that materialized in the wake of World War II America and included other prominent writers, most notably A LLEN GINSBERG and William Burroughs. Kerouac fi rst heard the term Beat from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler who used it to signify poverty and exhaustion. Kerouac, however, appropriated the word to describe a post–World War II generation of restless, curious, and spiritual young people eager to escape staid middle-class values and discover new modes of self-expression. With the 1957 publication of On the Road, widely recognized as the Beat “manifesto,” Kerouac became the leading, although involuntary, spokesperson for this alternative culture. And while he published several essays attempting to delineate the term, it is ultimately through his life and literature that we truly understand the ethos of this Beat generation. Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts; baptized Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, and affectionately called Ti Jean (Little Jack) by his friends and family. Both of his parents— Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque (whom everyone called Mémêre) and Leo-Alcide Kerouac—descended from French-Canadian immigrants. They married in 1915 and had two other children before Ti Jean

was born: Gerard, born in 1916, and Caroline, born in 1918. The Kerouacs were a solidly working-class family and devout Catholics. Leo was in the printing business and owned his own press until financial failure forced him to seek work in others’ shops, and Mémêre worked intermittently in a shoe factory to supplement the family’s income. Kerouac had a particularly strong attachment to Mémêre: He slept in her bed for much of his childhood and lived with her on and off for his entire life. One traumatic event that contributed to Jack’s strong maternal attachment was the tragic death of his brother, Gerard, in 1926. Gerard was diagnosed with rheumatic fever in 1924 and suffered with the disease for two years. Memories of his brother’s affliction and death would haunt Kerouac for the rest of his life and would later form the basis for his novel Visions of Gerard (1963). When Kerouac was only four years old, he became powerfully aware of death and profoundly affected by what he saw as a “world of shadows.” Kerouac’s strong imagination and interest in fantasy defined his early education. Because French was the only language spoken in the Kerouac home, he did not learn English until he attended school at the age of six. Shortly after he learned to read, young Kerouac began to write stories, as well as draw and narrate his own cartoons. He became particularly fascinated with the comic series The Shadow, which originated as a radio show and later became a pulp

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weekly. Kerouac would later invoke the title character of The Shadow in Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959), which describes his young teenage years and the solemn introspection and social distance that characterized his adolescence. While, on the one hand, Kerouac was drawn to solitude, on the other hand, he envisioned himself as a romantic hero. Biographers are often quick to point out Kerouac’s fragmented personality, and this split emerged in his early years. While Kerouac was a shy boy who cherished his time alone, both in the local woods of the Merrimack Valley and in the Lowell Public Library poring over the classics, he also had dreams of grandeur, not only as a writer but as an athlete. At five feet eight inches, Kerouac was relatively short, but he was strong and fast, becoming a star football player in high school. He was the team captain, was scouted by colleges, and secured a football scholarship to Columbia University. After graduating high school, Kerouac had to spend a year at Horace Mann School for Boys in New York to obtain the academic preparation necessary for attending Columbia. Kerouac’s experience at Horace Mann was his first foray into the world of fortune and privilege, as most of his classmates were members of wealthy Jewish families who sent their kids to school in chauffeured limousines. Kerouac, though, found inspiration in the energy and grittiness of Times Square; he began experimenting for the first time with drugs and alcohol and explored the growing culture of bop jazz. He gradually replaced visions of athletic stardom with dreams of becoming a famous writer. A football injury during his fi rst season at Columbia gave Kerouac the impetus to make the transition from athlete to aspiring writer. With a broken leg, Kerouac now had leisure time not only to focus on his schoolwork but to explore his own literary interests. Most importantly, he discovered the work of the American novelist Thomas Wolfe, who would become a major influence on his young literary career. In Vanity of Duluoz (1968), Kerouac tells us that Wolfe “woke [him] up to America as a Poem instead of America as a place to struggle around and sweat in. Mainly this dark-eyed Ameri-

can poet made me want to prowl, and roam, and see the real America that was there and that ‘had never been uttered’ ” (75). By the time his leg had healed, this dream of experiencing America had taken hold of him. In fall 1941 Kerouac left Columbia, signaling his new life as a writer and itinerant explorer of America. While Kerouac sensed that he was no longer interested in college, an alternative path did not clearly present itself. He worked in a variety of short-term jobs—as a gas station attendant, a short-order cook, a sports reporter—meandering up and down the East Coast as opportunity allowed and writing his first set of short stories, Atop an Underwood (first published in 1999). By 1942 America was at war, and, seeing an opportunity for adventure, Kerouac signed up as a scullion on the S.S. Dorchester, which was heading for Greenland. Soon after his return, he enlisted in the navy. Kerouac’s entrance into military life was dictated more by curiosity and romance than a passionate interest in the war. He had a strong distaste for violence and was ill prepared for the structure and demands of the navy. In an effort to be released, he feigned mental illness and was eventually discharged as having an “indifferent character.” His parents, now living on Long Island, had hoped Kerouac would finish his education at Columbia. He had tried to return to school briefly in 1942 but quickly left again. He always felt that his education was obtained outside the classroom, preferring to pursue “real adventures” in the urban landscape of New York City between 1943 and 1947. During this critical period, he moved in with his girlfriend, Edie Parker, a carefree and wealthy woman from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, who was taking art classes at Columbia. Through Edie and her friends, Kerouac met many of the central figures of the Beat era who would later be immortalized in his novels. Together with William S. Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac formed a type of intellectual commune, discussing authors (such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche), collaborating on poetry and prose, exploring emerging jazz forms, and searching for what Ginsberg and Carr called a “new vision.”

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Though Kerouac found much in the way of inspiration from this collaboration, he also found a fair amount of trouble. His new friends were primarily collegians who were seeking to escape the trappings of mainstream America and locate higher levels of consciousness. Their experiences, however, were not only intellectual but also physical: Heavy drinking and extensive drug use were the norm, occasionally accompanied by violence. One night in August 1944, Lucien Carr stabbed and killed David Kammerer, a man who had fallen in love with the handsome teen and had been stalking him for several years. After the murder, Carr sought Kerouac’s help, and eventually Kerouac was arrested and jailed as an accessory. Jack had no independent means of financial support and could not bail himself out. After his father refused to lend him the money, Kerouac turned to Edie for help. Her aunt paid for his bail but insisted that they marry first. Kerouac spent the first night of married life in his jail cell, waiting to be released. Although Kerouac was eventually acquitted of any charges, the marriage would be over within the year. Kerouac was not in a position to be a responsible husband, as he was working intermittently and could barely feed himself, let alone provide for his wife. More importantly, Kerouac was bingeing on both alcohol and Benzedrine, an amphetamine that was available at the time in over-the-counter inhalers. High on speed, Kerouac would stay awake for days on end, exploring the underworld of New York City with Burroughs and Ginsberg, hanging out with local hustlers and thieves. Although Kerouac completed several pieces of writing during this period (including an unpublished collaborative novel with Burroughs about the Kammerer killing, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks), he would later describe this time in New York City as a “year of low, evil decadence” (Vanity 259). Two critical medical events in 1945 forced Kerouac’s temporary retreat from this world. His father was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and Kerouac began to spend much of his time at home caring for him. Shortly thereafter, Kerouac himself was hospitalized with his first episode of what would become recurrent thrombophlebitis, or blood clots in the legs, brought on by his excessive use of Benzedrine.

This forced period of retreat was actually crucial to Kerouac’s literary career. Immobilized in the hospital for several weeks, Kerouac began to envision the first of his major novels, The Town and the City (1950). After Leo Kerouac’s death in spring 1946, Jack sprang to work writing, modeling his efforts on the work of Thomas Wolfe. The Town and the City is a semiautobiographical tale of Kerouac’s boyhood and of his friends, in which Kerouac himself takes shape in the five sons of the fictionalized Martin family. While working on the novel, in winter 1946, Jack met Neal Cassady, a rebellious Denver native with whom Kerouac shared a close connection almost instantly. Their meeting, and the next several years of Jack’s life, would form the basis of Kerouac’s second (and best-known) novel, On the Road (1955). Embarking on his first cross-country trip in July 1947, Kerouac also gathered the worldly knowledge necessary for him to conclude The Town and the City, which closes with one of the Martin boys’ turning away from conventional society and toward the open road. After spending almost two years traveling, Kerouac returned to his mother’s home and completed his 1,183-page manuscript of The Town and the City. After he shopped the book around to publishers (with the help of Allen Ginsberg), Harcourt Brace accepted the novel in March 1949 and assigned Robert Giroux to edit it into publishable form. It was finally released in 1950 and was met with moderate critical success. For Kerouac the pride of publishing his first novel was overshadowed by his drive to complete his second, which was jump-started by a rambling 40,000-word letter Jack received from Neal Cassady. Neal’s fast-paced confessional writing imitated the immediacy of real life, and in utilizing Cassady’s influence, Kerouac created what would become his trademark writing style. Inserting a roll of paper into his typewriter so that he would not have to waste time switching pages, Kerouac composed, over the course of about three weeks in spring 1951, a 175,000-word single-spaced paragraph, which would become his controversial novel On the Road. Though it was completed in 1951, On the Road would not be published for another six years. While seeking publication, Kerouac embarked upon what

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he considered his life’s work, an epic multivolume novel in the vein of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27). Kerouac called his saga “the Duluoz Legend,” intending to document his entire life in fictionalized form and go back in his old age to make uniform the many pseudonyms he had invented for his real-life acquaintances. These novels include Visions of Gerard (1963), Maggie Cassidy (1959), Tristessa (1960), and Desolation Angels (1965). In the eyes of some critics, though, Kerouac’s dream of a unified epic is overshadowed by the greatness of three novels: On the Road (1957), The Subterraneans (1958), and The Dharma Bums (1958). The Subterraneans was written on a three-night Benzedrine binge after Kerouac’s breakup with an AfricanAmerican woman known in the novel as Mardou Fox and is considered one of the finest examples of Kerouac’s confessional style, which he dubbed “spontaneous prose.” The Dharma Bums recounts a time in Kerouac’s life when he was invested in a version of Buddhism and follows an autobiographical character (in this case, named Ray Smith) on trips across the country and to the tops of mountains. The Dharma Bums, as does On the Road, portrays Kerouac as the pupil of a wiser male friend, in this case, the poet and Buddhist scholar Gary Snyder (renamed Japhy Ryder). These three novels have earned a reputation as his finest and have been continuously in print since their first publications. The period between 1951 and 1956 also saw the dissolution of Kerouac’s second marriage, this time to Joan Haverty. She and Jack had married impulsively in 1950, and Jack left her the following year after she told him she was pregnant with his child. These years also marked the ascendancy of the Beat generation: John Clellon Holmes published his essay “This Is the Beat Generation” in the New York Times in November 1952, introducing the word Beat into American vernacular as a term for the new generation of countercultural youths. In 1955 Allen Ginsberg and other Beat figures gave a powerful reading at San Francisco’s Gallery Six, and Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” (1956) sparked a landmark obscenity trial. Even with the growing appreciation of the Beats’ unconventional style, Viking Press rejected edited versions of On the Road until July 1955, when edi-

tors became convinced that it would be met with widespread acceptance. Finally published in 1957, On the Road received praise from some critics, while many deemed it a nonliterary, self-centered tract encouraging youths to resist civilization and partake in drugs, alcohol, and free-wheeling sexual behavior. Despite critical dispute, On the Road was a commercial success and gave Kerouac the freedom to publish subsequent novels with relatively little editorial interference, thus preserving his ideal of spontaneity in literature. The next decade saw the publication of a great body of his work, from novels to books of poetry to compilations of essays. Unfortunately, Kerouac felt ill at ease with his sudden notoriety as king of the Beats and slipped further into alcoholism and drug use, even participating in psychedelic drug experimentation with the noted drug-culture icon Timothy Leary. He withdrew from his peers; moved in with his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1964; and grew even closer to her in the wake of his sister’s death that same year. Though he traveled briefly in Europe, he remained mostly at home, marrying Stella Sampas, the sister of a childhood friend, in 1966. They relocated temporarily to Lowell, where Kerouac completed Vanity of Duluoz (1968), the last novel he would publish in his lifetime. They returned to Florida in 1968, just months after Neal Cassady died of congestive heart failure after becoming drunk and wandering away from a wedding party in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Kerouac himself would soon see the end of the road as a result of alcohol abuse. He developed cirrhosis of the liver in 1969, which led to internal hemorrhaging. Kerouac died in Mémêre’s house on October 21, 1969, at the age of 47. Though Kerouac’s early death is certainly tragic, his absence has led readers to appreciate the prodigious body of literature that he created in his short life. It is in viewing the history of counterculture that one can truly appreciate his contributions to the history of art and literature in America: Kerouac’s influence on the rock musicians of the 1960s forever changed the face of contemporary music, and his Beat manifesto On the Road continues to inspire readers to question mainstream values. He lives on

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as the subject of innumerable literature classes and as the namesake of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman). Though he died without completing his Duluoz Legend, Kerouac left behind a legendary and lasting contribution to American literary tradition, and to the history of American counterculture.

On the Road (1957) Kerouac’s most popular novel has retained notoriety not just for its greatness, but also for the mythic story surrounding its creation. Written over the course of a three-week creative spurt in April and May 1951, On the Road was first completed as one long paragraph on a roll of teletype paper that Kerouac inserted into his typewriter so that he could transcribe his thoughts freely, without the time-consuming burden of removing and reinserting pages. The result, a 175,000-word single-spaced block of text, would not see publication for six years but would eventually change the face of fiction writing. In this novel, Kerouac began to experiment with what would become his trademark style of writing, which he called “spontaneous prose.” Inspired by a 40,000-word letter he had received from his close friend Neal Cassady, as well as the improvisational style of the jazz music he first became enthralled with as a student in New York City, Kerouac wrote an outpouring of thoughts and emotions, creating repetitious patterns and lengthy sentences that flowed from one idea to the next. Though editors at Viking Press, to make it more publishable, pared down On the Road, it retained the raw energy and unique prosody of Kerouac’s manuscript and was eventually released in its final form in 1957. The novel is divided into four major sections, with a brief concluding segment. Like most of Kerouac’s novels, On the Road is an autobiographical tale presented using the narrative tools of fiction. The novel has a first-person narrator, Sal Paradise, who is based on Kerouac himself. The novel’s events span a period of Kerouac’s life from around Christmas 1946 to October 1950, although the action of the novel takes

place over the course of 24 months. Each section depicts a cross-country road trip embarked upon by Paradise, and the events in between trips are glossed over in just a few sentences. The months between are not important; the novel’s intent is to portray a life lived on the open road. The book opens with Sal’s life-altering introduction to Dean Moriarty, a character based on the charismatic derelict Neal Cassady, a Denver native who ran in the same social circle as Kerouac in New York City in the 1940s. The bohemian group of intellectuals and writers included the future Beat generation greats Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, to whom Kerouac assigns the pseudonyms Carlo Marx and Old Bull Lee, respectively. Instantly charmed by Dean’s naive intellectual yearnings, as well as his ebullience and lust for life, Sal feels inspired to indulge his restless yearnings by traveling to San Francisco. The first section of the novel documents this fi rst road trip, on which Paradise buses and hitchhikes his way from the East Coast to the West, stopping briefly in Denver to visit Carlo and Dean. After arriving in San Francisco, he overstays his welcome at the home of his old friend Remi Boncoeur, and on his way to Los Angeles, he meets a Mexican woman named Terry with whom he becomes romantically involved for the next several weeks. They work seasonal labor together picking cotton, but when the season ends in October, Sal leaves her and returns to New York. The second section continues the story over a year later, when Paradise is visiting his family in Testament, Virginia, during the Christmas season of 1948. Unexpectedly, Dean shows up with his exwife, Marylou, and their friend Ed Dunkel in Dean’s then-brand-new car, a Hudson, and the group takes off on a whirlwind cross-country trek, driving nonstop from Testament to New Jersey, back to Testament, to New York, to New Orleans to visit Bull Lee and leave Ed Dunkel with his wife, Galatea, and finally to California. While the trip is exhilarating, it ends, as Sal’s first trip, does, in abandonment and disappointment. Dean leaves Marylou (and Sal) to be with Camille, a different girlfriend, with whom he has a daughter, and Sal plans to take a bus back to New York. Before departing, Paradise relates, “We

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were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care” (178). In section 3, though, Sal and Dean’s relationship triggers what the critic Warren French calls the novel’s “emotional climax” (French 36). After spending some time alone in Denver to find Dean, Sal brings Dean back to San Francisco, where Sal is living with Camille and their daughter, Amy. Camille kicks Dean out after a huge fight, and Sal suggests that they travel to Italy together. At the moment of his suggestion, the two men briefly stare at each other, and Sal thinks, “It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories” (189–190). Though Sal demonstrates a brotherly commitment to Dean, their relationship begins to deteriorate, as do Dean’s relationships with his friends and family. Galatea Dunkel and the wives of his other friends have wished him ill as a result of his poor treatment of Camille, and upon visiting a cousin and a childhood friend in Denver, Dean is told that his family no longer wishes to be associated with him. He meets a woman named Inez at a party and decides to move in with her, once again abandoning the other women in his life, his daughter, and lastly, Sal. The novel’s fourth section picks up at a point in Kerouac’s life after his first novel, The Town and the City, had given him moderate financial success. Sal decides to use the money from his book to travel west, this time leaving Dean behind in New York. However, Dean joins Sal in Denver, with the excuse of obtaining a fast, cheap divorce from Camille while in Mexico. Along with their friend Stan Shephard, they venture to the Mexican town of Gregoria, where they encounter a fantasyland of marijuana, alcohol, and prostitutes. After a wild time, they drive on to Mexico City, where Sal develops dysentery and a fever so high that he experiences delirium. Having obtained his divorce papers, Dean rushes back to New York, leaving Sal behind for the last time. Sal narrates, “When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there,

sick, to get on with his wives and woes” (302). Sal decides not to complain; that is just the way Dean is. In the brief fifth part, Kerouac wraps up the narrative. Dean divorces Camille, marries Inez, and returns to San Francisco to stay with Camille. Sal meets “the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for,” and they agree “to love each other madly” (304). At the end of the novel, Sal bids Dean good-bye and turns to a more stable lifestyle, although he tells the reader that he still thinks of Dean Moriarty when he thinks about the sprawling countryside of the American landscape and the unpredictability of everyday life. The 1957 publication of On the Road not only opened the door for Kerouac’s later, more experimental dabbling in “spontaneous prose,” but legitimated the work of writers struggling to fit into traditional forms. While the American author Truman Capote responded to On the Road with his famous dismissal of it as literature “That’s not writing, it’s typing,” Kerouac’s fictionalized account of real-life events paved the way for Capote’s work with his own groundbreaking “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood (1966). And while Kerouac’s writing style signals a departure from convention, his novel simultaneously situates itself within Western literary tradition. Kerouac modeled his early writing on the works of the American fiction writer Thomas Wolfe, and while On the Road is a departure from Kerouac’s earlier imitations, Kerouac credits Wolfe with his initial yearnings to travel and observe the country. Moreover, On the Road is a modern example of the picaresque novel, a literary term invented to refer to Spanish novels in the 16th century and used by scholars to define a narrative text that relates episodes in the adventures of a roguish hero. As such, On the Road may be associated with such celebrated works as Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615), Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In turn, On the Road has become a part of the American literary canon as one of the foremost representations of the Beat generation. Harshly criticized at the time of its first publication, On the Road represented to many American readers a manual for destroying the fabric of society by engaging in drug

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and alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, and general social upheaval. To others it was one of the first documents of an emerging bohemian counterculture, with which people from all walks of life who felt oppressed by mainstream cultural values could identify and relate. Though in his lifetime Kerouac chose to dissociate himself from both politics and later subcultures like the hippies of the 1960s, his work undeniably influenced artists and activists at a crucial time in post–World War II American culture. And as time has passed, Kerouac’s novel continues appeal to those who feel at odds with societal norms, and to inspire others to live and write in unconventional ways.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the roles that Kerouac assigns to women in the novel. 2. Kerouac often uses symbolic names when assigning pseudonyms to his fictionalized characters. Discuss possible symbolic meanings in On the Road of the name of Kerouac’s character, Sal Paradise. 3. At the start of On the Road, Sal refers to “the East of my youth and the West of my future,” dreaming of the West as a land of opportunity, natural beauty, and cowboys. After the events of the novel, does Paradise still have the same idealized notion of the West? How do his travels and encounters on the road change the way he thinks about both the East and the West? 4. On the Road has been said to have three major characters: Sal, Dean, and the American landscape. Discuss how the setting in this novel is as much a character as either of its two leading men. 5. Warren French writes, “On the Road is a traditional tale of youth’s disillusionment, perhaps closest in the American tradition to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby” (French 44). Compare and contrast the two novels. How do issues of social class affect each of the novels differently?

The Dharma Bums (1958) The Dharma Bums is the third of Kerouac’s most popular novels, the others being On the Road (1957)

and The Subterraneans (1958). At the time of its publication, response to the novel was harsh: Critics found that it lacked the energy and edginess of his preceding work. Even his close friend and fellow Beat generation writer Allen Ginsberg, who gave it a supportive review in the Village Voice, urged Kerouac to shy away from composing “travelogues” in the future. The Dharma Bums is allegedly Kerouac’s only novel that was published without revision or rewriting and as such contains both the raw emotion characteristic of Kerouac’s confessional style, as well as the technical and structural complications inherent in a first draft. The novel is divided only by chapter breaks, but larger, informal sections are evident in the text, though critics are in disagreement as to whether to divide the work into thirds or quarters (On the Road was in four labeled sections). The Dharma Bums documents Kerouac’s life in 1955–56, when he was living in Berkeley, California, with Allen Ginsberg. The novel opens with Kerouac’s character, in this instance assuming the name Ray Smith, riding illegally on a freight train in the company of a wandering bum whose habit of carrying a prayer by Saint Teresa leads Ray to conclude that he is a sort of spiritual figure. The Dharma Bums is, from its very first pages, one of Kerouac’s most openly spiritual works and was composed during the height of his interest in the Buddhist faith. Indeed, most of the novel recounts Ray’s tutelage at the hands of Japhy Ryder, a Buddhist poet and scholar based on Kerouac’s real life friend and mentor Gary Snyder. Japhy teaches Ray about Buddhist poetry, mountain climbing, and liberated sexuality. Though Japhy is not present in a large middle section of the novel, his influence informs Ray’s thought processes throughout. When recounting the infamous Gallery Six reading, where Allen Ginsberg delivered his groundbreaking reading of the poem “Howl” in what is known as the “birth trauma of the Beat Generation” (here represented as Alvah Goldbook’s reading “Wail”), Kerouac focuses instead on describing Snyder’s work, which he considered more “earnest and strong and humanly hopeful” (14). Some of the most striking passages in the book appear in Kerouac’s description of climbing the

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California Matterhorn with Japhy and Henry Morley (based on his friend John Montgomery). While much of the novel contains shorter, haiku-inspired sentences, in this section the reader encounters Kerouac’s trademark style of “spontaneous prose,” in which impressions and ideas are recorded in a fast, associative, jazz-inspired outburst, thus resonating with charged sensation. Describing the landscape of the Matterhorn, he writes: The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. (62)

Ray’s climb symbolizes a retreat from stifling civilization toward an epiphany in the more spiritual setting of nature. Upon returning from their trip, Japhy refers to a “rucksack revolution,” in which young people will abandon mainstream consumer culture and travel simply throughout the American landscape. This idea enthralled Kerouac and influenced his later work, such as his 1960 essay “The Vanishing American Hobo.” Still, Ray quickly grows tired of California society, particularly after his friend Cody Pomeray (based on Neal Cassady) leaves his neurotic girlfriend Rosie (based on Natalie Jackson) under Ray’s care in her suicide (Pomeray’s leaving results). Ray travels to North Carolina to visit his mother and sister but has a personality clash with his sister’s husband and returns to Berkeley after a few months. He and Japhy take up residence at the home of a Buddhist family in Northern California, but both seem to be growing weary of their “dharma bum” lifestyle. After one last backpacking trip Japhy goes off to Japan, and Ray, at Japhy’s suggestion, takes a job as a lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. As the novel closes, Ray stands atop the peak and cries out, “Japhy . . . I owe so much to Desola-

tion, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all” (244).

For Discussion or Writing 1. On his way to camp in Riverside, California, Ray experiences a brief moment of clarity in which it becomes clear to him that “the only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted . . . would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be ‘supervised’” (121). The author Ken Kesey manipulates a similar vision in his 1962 novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. How is Kesey’s novel similar to The Dharma Bums? How does Kesey’s intent render his work different from Kerouac’s? 2. In Buddhism, the concept of dharma refers to the teachings of the Buddha and thus suggests the revelation of ultimate truth. Using this literal definition, discuss what may be implied by Japhy Ryder’s term dharma bum. 3. Compare and contrast the different interpretations of Buddhist spirituality espoused by Ray, Japhy, and Alvah Goldbook. 4. Both On the Road and The Dharma Bums depict Kerouac’s character as a pupil and follower of a male hero and friend. How is Dean Moriarity’s role in On the Road similar to Japhy Ryder’s in The Dharma Bums? What is the significance of Kerouac’s choice to downplay the presence of Neal’s character (Cody Pomeray) in The Dharma Bums?

The Subterraneans (1958) Grove Press published The Subterraneans in 1958, within months of the publications of both On the Road and The Dharma Bums. Kerouac claims to have completed the novel within “three full moon nights of October,” while under the influence of the amphetamine Benzedrine. Critical opinion on the novel, as with his other works, is polarized: Some claim that The Subterraneans is his finest example of “spontaneous prose,” while others find it disorganized, slangy, and basically in need of the editorial

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revision seen in the completed versions of On the Road and The Dharma Bums. While Kerouac intended The Subterraneans to fit into the massive autobiographical work that he called the Duluoz Legend, the novel’s stylistic differences prohibit its full inclusion as part of the saga. It does, however, form an important chronological link, as it documents a period in Kerouac’s life during summer 1953. While the events it parallels took place in New York’s Greenwich Village, The Subterraneans is set in San Francisco; some critics cite this point as a challenge to the supposed believability of Kerouac’s other novels. As in his other works, Kerouac centers the narrative on an autobiographical character, this time named Leo Percepied. The critic Warren French suggests the translation of the name as “Lion with Pierced-Foot,” perhaps to refer to Achilles or Oedipus, though a nod to Kerouac’s character as a perceptive observer, and the use of his father’s first name, are other likely sources as well. The plot of the novel follows Leo’s two-month relationship with Mardou Fox, a half-black, half– American Indian woman who runs in Percepied’s social circle. The novel itself contains as much rambling rumination as plot, as the narrator acknowledges, stating that it is difficult to compose a narrative when you’re “such an egomaniac all you can do is take off on big paragraphs about minor details about yourself and the big soul details about others go sitting and waiting around” (3–4). Much of the novel documents explicit sexual encounters of Mardou and Leo, as well as Leo’s experiences under the influence of marijuana, or “tea,” as he calls it. Like Leo, Fox is assigned a symbolic name, perhaps to refer to Kerouac’s animalistic characterization of her throughout the novel. Leo describes Mardou as “snakelike” and consistently refers to her body in dehumanizing, misogynistic ways. His first thought upon seeing her is “By God, I’ve got to get involved with that little woman,” and even by the end of the novel, he still expresses the idea that “the man can make the little woman bend, she was made to bend” (2, 107). As does On the Road, The Subterraneans resists categorization as a bildungsroman (comingof-age story) because the narrator reaches the end of the novel without growing or changing.

Another constant is the narrator’s emphasis on his racial difference from the “Negro” Mardou. The morning after their first sexual encounter, as he looks over at the sleeping Mardou, he describes her face alternately as looking like an Aztecan mask and having “a boxer nose,” which he describes as “slightly Mongoloid” (18). He expresses concern that Mardou is involved with him only to steal his “white man heart,” calling her “a Negress sneaking in the world sneaking the holy white men for sacrificial rituals later when they’ll be roasted and roiled” (49). Leo’s convictions that Mardou and he exist on fundamentally different planes because of their racial difference, coupled with his chauvinist idea that he can mold her desires to fit his own, eventually lead to their turbulent breakup. Still, gender and racial difference are not the only sources of prejudice in Leo’s life. The Subterraneans has been critiqued as one of Kerouac’s most homophobic novels as well. Percepied refers pejoratively to “fags” throughout the novel and even recounts an instance when he physically and verbally harassed a “queer” when he was younger. Contrary to these statements, Leo endangers his relationship with Mardou by engaging in ambiguously homoerotic behavior throughout the novel. He abandons her to spend a night with Arial Lavalina (based on Gore Vidal) and seemingly becomes infatuated with a young male member of the subterraneans. Although he does not form any fulfi lling relationships with homosexual men, it is safe to assume that homosexual contact played a role in Percepied’s (and, in friends’ accounts, Kerouac’s) life. But as Ann Charters points out in her biography of Kerouac, “Kerouac’s pride in tossing The Subterraneans off in three nights gave him more lasting satisfaction than anything that happened between him and the girl that summer” (195). Indeed, in this novel readers can most clearly see the detriment to personal relationships that is the result of Kerouac’s insistence on being the constant observer, always removing himself and seeking experience so that he can later document it. Seemingly, the only meaningful relationship he can maintain is with his mother, with whom Kerouac was living at the time The Subterraneans takes place. As his relationship with

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Mardou falls apart, Leo has a vision of his mother’s saying to him, “Poor Little Leo, poor Little Leo, you suffer, men suffer so, you’re all alone in the world I’ll take care of you, I would very much like to take care of you all your days my angel” (104). This quote harks back to the common theme in Kerouac’s writings that all life is suffering. From his early Catholic childhood to his Buddhist quest for Enlightenment, Kerouac advances his theory that even in a world of inspiring music, good friends, and a dynamic landscape, the only constant is anguish.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare The Subterraneans to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), a novel that Kerouac claimed to have used as a model for his own work. 2. A 1958 Time magazine review of The Subterraneans called the group to which the title refers a band of “‘urban Thoreaus’ in an existential state of passive resistance to society.” Compare the “subterraneans” to Henry Thoreau in Civil Disobedience (1849). Does Kerouac’s characters’ urban status render them utterly different from Thoreau, or are the two comparable?

“The Vanishing American Hobo” (1960) “The Vanishing American Hobo” fi rst appeared in the March 1960 issue of the now-defunct travel magazine Holiday. It is perhaps better known, though, for its republication in the 1960 volume Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac’s first outspokenly autobiographical work. Notably, the republication includes the additional last line “The woods are full of wardens.” In Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac recalls the years he spent gathering the life experience he compiled in his novels, forsaking in these pieces the guise of fiction while maintaining his trademark Beat style. In “Vanishing,” Kerouac glorifies the hobo and his various manifestations throughout the American landscape, from the California pack rat traveler to the urban street panhandler. According to his biographer Ellis Amburn, the prototype of Kerouac’s American hobo is William Holmes “Big Slim” Hubbard, a war

buddy of Jack’s with whom he was discharged and transferred back to the United States for reasons of mental instability. As Neal Cassady later would, Big Slim, a fellow former football player, represented to Kerouac a “charming derelict” for whom society would always provide because of his magnetism and his appeal to nurturing women (Amburn 73). While glorifying his archetypal hobo, Kerouac also criticizes a society that increasingly forces the hobo to vanish. He points out the irony that while camping is a glorified activity for Boy Scouts, a grown man sleeping in the woods can end up in jail for vagrancy. He condemns American society’s ever-increasing police force, whom he characterizes as destroyers of freedom, supported by taxpayers’ dollars, who seem to have nothing better to do than harass well-meaning hobos. Kerouac recounts an instance when he was walking in an Arizona desert looking for a place to sleep and was accosted by three police cars. The police question him and finally let him go, though they cannot seem to understand why a man would want to sleep outside when he can afford a hotel room. Kerouac further faults the media, who portray “the cop heroes on TV,” for the disappearance of the American hobo. He asserts that the media instill a fear of the hobo in the American people, “because of what newspapers made the hobo to be—the rapist, the strangler, child-eater.” He also claims that the end to his hoboing resulted from increasing television stories about “the abominableness of strangers with packs.” Writing at the end of the 1950s, Kerouac prophesies the incredible power of the media to shape the opinions of the American people, which would become an integral part of critiques of American culture in the years to come. Closely linked to the increasing media presence in America is increasing consumerism. Kerouac documents in The Dharma Bums (1958) the sentiments of his close friend, the then-aspiring Buddhist guru Gary Snyder, using the fictionalized character of Japhy Ryder. Ryder refers to a “rucksack revolution,” in which young people will forsake mainstream consumerist culture and experience true freedom within the American landscape: “Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand

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that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway . . . general junk you fi nally always see a week later in the garbage anyway” (97). Kerouac’s archetypal hobo is such a traveler, a “dharma bum” who may traverse physical space, but whose true quest is an internal struggle against mainstream consumer culture and toward spiritual freedom. Furthermore, Kerouac compares the hobo to a Buddhist monk, who participates in a culture that values poverty and freedom from desire as a virtue. In his “Biographical Resume,” also composed in 1958 and later published in Heaven and Other Poems (1977), Kerouac writes, “I am only a jolly storyteller and have nothing to do with politics or schemes and my only plan is the old Chinese way of the Tao: ‘avoid the authorities’” (40). While “The Vanishing American Hobo” certainly illustrates Kerouac’s desire to “avoid the authorities,” it also suggests a message that is perhaps lacking in his more apolitical work The Dharma Bums. Kerouac is critical of the changing attitudes of post–World War II American culture, a time of economic prosperity for some, but of growing intolerance for those who refuse to conform to the mainstream.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In “The Vanishing American Hobo,” Kerouac argues for the hobo status of numerous historical and cultural figures, from Jesus to W. C. Fields. Utilizing his criteria, defend another celebrity as Kerouac’s archetypal American hobo. 2. Kerouac writes, “I myself was a hobo but only of sorts, as you see, because I knew someday my literary efforts would be rewarded by social protection.” He cites 1956 as the year he gave up hoboing. Incidentally, 1957 marks the commercial success of his novel On the Road. Is it possible that Kerouac’s literary success, rather than his theories in the essay, distanced him from his hobo lifestyle? If so, does this weaken his argument? 3. In this essay, Kerouac expresses his belief that removing oneself from mainstream society is the only valid method of resistance, writing, “The Hobo is born of pride, having nothing to do with a community but with himself and other hobos

and maybe a dog.” Consider the implications of Kerouac’s emphasis on individualism, especially in light of the social movements that would occur in the decades following the publication of “Hobo.”

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON KEROUAC AND HIS WORK 1. In the construction of his “spontaneous prose” style, Kerouac explored and employed the tools of the emerging culture of bop jazz. Discuss the portrayal of jazz music in one of Kerouac’s major novels. Furthermore, how does the influence of jazz, with its unique interplay of repetition and spontaneity, show up in Kerouac’s writing style? Refer to specific instances in your selected text. 2. Literary scholarship uses the term unreliable narrator to refer to a narrative voice that cannot be fully trusted because of various factors. Though his novels are based on real-life events, Kerouac’s narrators sometimes demonstrate characteristics of unreliability. Discuss such an instance in one of Kerouac’s major works. 3. In a 1958 interview with Ben Hecht, Kerouac was questioned about his “affinity for Negroes.” In response, Kerouac called the black man the “original Beat character,” because without even trying, he has fun, but he also suffers (Empty Phantoms 82). Kerouac incorporates his racial politics into his fiction, faulting his “white ambitions” for the failure of his romantic relationship with Terry in On the Road, and later Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans. Discuss the role of race in Kerouac’s novels. Although Kerouac respects black culture, how is racial prejudice still at work in his writing? 4. The literary tradition of the travel narrative is generally associated with the archetypal quest, a series of challenges that are overcome by a protagonist as part of the completion of a goal. Kerouac’s travel writing does not always fit into this mold. Contrast one of Kerouac’s travel narratives with the work of a more traditional travel writer, such as Mark Twain. 5. As an American writer in the 1950s, Kerouac was subject to the influence of gender stereotypes in

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American culture. In light of these stereotypes, discuss the portrayal of women in the work of Jack Kerouac. How do Kerouac’s own conceptions of gender show up in his work, particularly as evidenced by the roles in which he places female characters and the way he describes women in his writing? WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Bloom, Harold, ed. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. New York: Penguin, 1990. Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973. Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac: A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1990. Feied, Frederick. No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac. New York: Citadel Press, 1964. French, Warren. Jack Kerouac. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Holmes, Clellon. “This Is the Beat Generation.” New York Times 16 November 1952, p. SM10. Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981. “Jack Kerouac Bio and Links.” Beatmusuem.org. Available online. URL: http://www.beatmuseum. org/kerouac/jackkerouac.html. Accessed May 29, 2007. “Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Present at the Creation.” National Public Radio. September 10, 2002. Available online. URL: http://www.npr.org/programs/ morning/features/patc/ontheroad/. Accessed February 27, 2007.

Jones, James T. Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962. ———. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin, 1958. ———. Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three. New York: Grove Press, 1959. ———. Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac. Edited by Paul Maher, Jr. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005. ———. Heaven and Other Poems. Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press, 1977. ———. Lonesome Traveler. New York: Grove Press, 1960. ———. On The Road. New York: Penguin, 1955. ———. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove Press, 1958. ———. Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education. New York: Coward-McCann, 1968. ———. Visions of Cody. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. ———. Visions of Gerard. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House, 1979. Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait. New York: H. Holt, 1998. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove Press, 1983. Turner, Steve. Angelheaded Hipster: A Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: Viking, 1996. Updike, John. “On the Sidewalk.” In Assorted Prose. New York: Knopf, 1965. What Happened to Kerouac? Directed by Richard Lerner and Lewis MacAdams. DVD. New Yorker Films, 1986.

Caitlin Shanley

Ken Kesey (1935–2001) True freedom and insanity spring from the same spiritual well, already mixed, just add incentive. (Interview with Paul Krassner)

K

en Elton Kesey was born September 17, 1935, to the dairy farmers Fred and Geneva Smith Kesey. Though he was born in La Junta, Colorado, his family moved to Springfield, Oregon, just outside Eugene, in 1946, and the landscape of the Pacific Northwest became the backdrop for most of Kesey’s life, as well as his writings. In his greatest works, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), the Oregon setting constitutes not just the location but also the landscape of the characters’ life experience. Today Kesey is considered not just one of the principal writers of that American region but also of the United States as a whole. His capacity to represent universal human struggles and emotions eloquently and humorously has allowed him to transcend the label of a regional writer, and his major novels are known as some of the greatest to be written during the 1960s. Kesey and his brother, Chuck, spent a lot of time outside, exploring and hunting in the forests of the Willamette Valley. Kesey also enjoyed comic books and adventure stories, particularly those of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Gray. The latter would even one day become his son’s namesake. Kesey attended public schools in Springfield, where he participated on the boxing, wrestling, and football teams and was voted “most likely to succeed” by his high school graduating class. He went on to the University of Oregon, where he continued his wres-

tling career, almost qualifying for the Olympics. He also became active in theater and was a member of a fraternity. Kesey graduated in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in speech and communications. During his junior year Kesey married his high school sweetheart, Faye Haxby, and shortly after his graduation, they moved together to Los Angeles. Kesey spent a year playing bit roles in Hollywood fi lms and composing his fi rst and still unpublished novel “End of Autumn,” about college athletics. He then entered the graduate level writing program at Stanford on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship; there he studied under Frank O’Connor, Malcolm Cowley, and Wallace Stegner, alongside blooming writers like Tillie Olsen, Ernest Gaines, and Ed McClanahan, among others. He spent much of his time working on another unpublished novel, “Zoo,” which documented San Francisco’s bohemian North Beach community. While at Stanford, Kesey lived on the infamous Perry Lane, the hub of Palo Alto’s budding bohemian subculture. There, in 1959, he met Vik Lovell, a psychology graduate student who encouraged him to participate in experiments of “psychomimetic” (imitating a psychotic state) drugs at the Veterans Hospital at Menlo Park, California. There Kesey was introduced to drugs like psilocybin, mescaline, and peyote, but most notably, to LSD. In 1961 Kesey took a job as a night guard on the psychiatric ward of the same hospital. For-

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ever changed by his experiences with drugs, Kesey would go to work under the influence of hallucinogens, which gave him the feeling of being able to see into the faces of the patients on a higher level of consciousness. During one such hallucination, Kesey saw the face of an American Indian, and this vision became the basis for the narrator in his fi rst major novel, Chief Bromden in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The novel takes place in a mental hospital outside Portland, Oregon, where the schizophrenic Bromden has been hospitalized for more than 15 years. Bromden, who pretends to be a deaf and mute to avoid confrontation with the hospital staff, is forever changed by the appearance of Randle Patrick McMurphy, a rambunctious and dynamic convict who has himself committed in order to avoid labor on a work farm and eventually falls victim to a lobotomy by the hospital staff and a mercy killing at the hands of Bromden. Kesey’s experiences both with mind-altering substances and with an actual mental institution heavily influenced the novel, as did the work of the writers of the Beat generation, particularly JACK K EROUAC. While Kesey’s style differs dramatically from Kerouac’s, Kesey admired Kerouac’s ability to create a rhythm that moved smoothly through different ideas, as well as his focus on lived experience. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, published in February 1962, was an instant success, earning Kesey both critical acclaim and popular culture credibility. His popularity soared to greater heights with its translation into a play version in 1963 and even more with the release of the five-time Academy Award winning fi lm version in 1975 that won five Academy Awards, though Kesey denounced the fi lm because it lacked Bromden’s narration. With the profits from the novel, Kesey moved briefly with his family to Oregon, where he began researching his next novel. He then returned to California, and after Perry Lane was sold to a developer, Kesey bought property and a house in La Honda, California. This house later became the site of Kesey’s infamous gatherings of diverse individuals, from Beat writers to the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, who together engaged in hallucinogenic experiences and wild parties.

At the house in La Honda, Kesey also fi nished his second published novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, which was released in July 1964. The novel, about a logging family resisting unionization in small-town Oregon, was equal to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in quality but received less praise because of its inaccessibility and length (over 600 pages). As does Cuckoo’s Nest, the novel relies heavily on point of view, but it goes one step further as that point of view switches throughout the text, a style some readers found difficult. Also as its predecessor was, Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a fi lm, the fi rst fi lm to be shown on HBO when the channel premiered in 1972. Though it boasted stars like Paul Newman and Henry Fonda and was approved by Kesey himself, the movie, like its novelistic counterpart, could not come close to matching the success of Cuckoo’s Nest. The success of his novel, though, was not fi rst on Kesey’s mind. In spring 1964, just after completing Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey bought a 1939 International Harvester school bus, which he and his group of friends (who had dubbed themselves the “Merry Pranksters”) painted with psychedelic colors and named Further. In summer 1964, Kesey and the Pranksters drove cross-country in the bus, piloted by the Beat icon Neal Cassady, on a journey from California to New York, which Ed McClanahan later called America’s “fi rst national contact high.” They also shot about 40 hours of fi lm for a project they called simply “The Movie,” which would later be called Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Band of Pranksters Look for a Kool Place. After returning from the trek, many of the Merry Pranksters took up residence at or around Kesey’s house in La Honda and engaged in “happenings” that included music, screenings of “The Movie,” and consumption of LSD. At future gatherings, LSD was distributed freely in what the Pranksters called “acid tests,” as immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s infamous nonfiction novel that documents this period: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). As the antics of the Pranksters escalated, though, Kesey began to experience problems with the authorities, as well as confl icts within his own

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subcultural group, now more fi rmly solidified as the nascent “hippie” movement. In April 1965, Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana, and during the following year of trials and appeals, he delved further and further into drug use. When speaking at an antiwar protest in Berkeley, California, he rambled so incoherently that he angered the audience and effectively ostracized himself from the large antiwar faction of the hippies. He also performed several of his large-scale “acid tests” at the rally, alienating him from academic LSD advocates such as Timothy Leary. Kesey found himself not only in jeopardy with mainstream society but also isolated from antiestablishment society. On January 17, 1966, he was found guilty of an April 1965 marijuana charge, and two days later, while awaiting appeal, he was arrested again for possession of marijuana. Facing a possible five-year jail term, he decided instead to fake his suicide and flee to Mexico, where he was joined by Faye; their children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon; and some of his fellow Pranksters, including the 19-year-old Mountain Girl, who was then pregnant with Kesey’s daughter, Sunshine. He returned to the United States in September 1966 and was soon captured by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). After pleading nolo contendere to a charge of “knowingly being in a place where marijuana was kept,” Kesey served his two sentences concurrently, spending June to November 1967 at the San Mateo County Jail and the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Honor Camp. During his imprisonment, he composed elaborate journals, which were published posthumously as Kesey’s Jail Journal in 2003. After his release, Kesey returned to the Willamette Valley of his childhood, as he moved with his family to a farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, which would be his home for the rest of his life. From March to June 1969, he and his family lived in London, where Kesey worked with the Beatles’ Apple Records on an unsuccessful recording project that featured authors reading their own work. Upon his return to the United States, he refused the Pranksters’ pleas to embark on a trip to the Woodstock festival, thus signifying his mov-

ing away from their wild ways and toward a life of farming and family. At the time of his arrest, he expressed distrust with writing as an expressive form, and during the two decades from 1969 to 1989 he was productive intermittently. In 1971 he and Paul Krassner edited The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, and in 1973 he published Kesey’s Garage Sale, a compilation of his writing and that of his friends, which Kesey ironically titled as such because, as he wrote in the introduction, it was “a familiar maneuver that puts stale outmoded stored members of your ordinary household back into the economic flow of life as we know it today.” Notably, Garage Sale included Kesey’s screenplay Over the Border, a fictionalized account of his experiences as a fugitive in Mexico. In 1974 Kesey began the roughly annual publication Spit in the Ocean, a collaboration of close friends that included his noteworthy Grandma Whittier stories. Later that year, Rolling Stone sent Kesey to Egypt to write five “dispatches” about his exploration of the pyramids. The following years, though, were difficult for Kesey both in his work and in his personal life, culminating in 1984 with the tragic death of his younger son, Jed, in a highway accident on a University of Oregon wrestling team trip. In August 1986, Kesey published Demon Box, a collection of mostly previously unpublished work (including the Rolling Stone articles), which he dedicated “To Jed / across the river / riding point.” Over the course of three academic terms, from 1989 to 1990, Kesey worked with a group of 13 graduate students in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon to create Caverns, a collaborative mystery novel published under the pseudonym O. U. Levon, for “University of Oregon novel.” Although 1990 also marked the year of Kesey’s publication of The Further Inquiry, a screenplay, the completion of Caverns reignited Kesey’s career as a fiction writer, and he published his fi rst new novel in several decades in 1992. Sailor Song, set in a 21st-century Alaskan village after much of the world has been wrecked by human abuse of the environment, was very poorly received, even prompting the New York Times

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Book Review writer Donald E. Westlake to comment, “Sailor Song does not make one particle of sense.” His fi nal novel, prophetically titled Last Go Round (1994), did not win the favor of critics either. The 1990s also saw the publication of two children’s books by Kesey, Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear (1992) and The Sea Lion: A Story of the Cliff People (1995), as well as a play, Twister (1994). Ken Kesey spent the last few years of his life in relative obscurity, making infrequent appearances at concerts and literary events. He and a fellow Prankster, Ken Babbs, maintained a Web site, IntrepidTrips.com, which Babbs continues to update today. In 2001, Kesey fell ill with liver cancer and in November underwent surgery to remove a tumor and a substantial portion of his liver. On November 10, he died of complications related to the surgery. He was 66. A memorial service, overflowing with countercultural and literary comrades, was held in downtown Eugene, Oregon, on November 14. Though Kesey’s death was a blow, his legacy continues through his friends and his children, who continue to collaborate on projects like the restoration of Further. His contribution to the literary canon, too, will not be forgotten. His novels, as well as his revolutionary ideals, have left an indelible imprint on American culture.

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey’s fi rst published novel, appeared in 1962. While enrolled in the graduate writing program at Stanford University in 1959, Kesey made extra money as a paid volunteer at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, California, in some of the earliest government drug experiments with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs. In 1961, he took a job as a nighttime aide in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital, and he spent hours talking with the patients there, sometimes under the influence of psychedelic drugs. His hallucinations coupled with his personal experiences primed Kesey to write One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a story not just about conceptions of

insanity and drug use, but about the macrocosm of post–World War II American society at large. The novel takes place almost entirely within the walls of a mental institution somewhere outside Portland, Oregon. The narrator, Chief Bromden (nicknamed “Chief Broom” by the aides because his duties include sweeping), feigns deafness and muteness in order to avoid interaction with others in the hospital, as well as to gain access to otherwise restricted spaces. Kesey conceived of Bromden while under the influence of peyote, when the tall and broad American Indian appeared to him as a hallucination. Though Bromden has great physical presence, he, as have the other men in the hospital, has been made to feel small by the dehumanizing efforts of the hospital staff, as well as the larger oppressive network, which Bromden refers to as the “Combine.” Literally speaking, a combine refers not just to a conspiratorial combination of persons, but also to an agricultural machine that physically cuts down grain. Likewise, the men are cut down until the arrival of a new patient, Randle Patrick McMurphy. McMurphy, whose initials (R.P.M.) also stand for “revolutions per minute,” has been committed to the hospital after convincing the work farm where he was imprisoned for assault and battery of his insanity. He is a rambunctious redhead and immediately fi lls the ward with the previously unheard sound of laughter. His reintroduction of laughter, along with gambling, sexuality, and general rebelliousness, begins to free the men from the stranglehold of Nurse Ratched, or Big Nurse, the head of the ward and the chief oppressor of the men, along with her black attendants. The word ratchet literally means a set of teeth which mesh with a cog in a machine, and Nurse Ratched is indeed a component of the machinery of the Combine. She strips the men of their power through emasculation, contributing to one of the major themes in the novel: the castration of men at the hands of women. Nearly all of the women in Kesey’s novel are portrayed as threatening to men. In addition to Nurse Ratched, the supervisor of the hospital is a woman, leading Harding, a patient who is tortured by his wife’s overt sexual-

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ity, to conclude, “We are victims of a matriarchy here.” Another of the patients, Billy Bibbit, is a 31-year-old man whose mother does not allow him to develop into an adult, particularly in terms of sexual development. When Bibbit fi nally achieves some sense of sexual maturity (after sleeping with a prostitute who is a friend of McMurphy’s), Nurse Ratched threatens to tell his mother, leading him to commit suicide. Even Bromden suffers at the hands of an overbearing woman. His father takes his wife’s last name and eventually loses his land and his sense of self-worth, later turning to alcoholism, as a result of her henpecking. Though Kesey’s portrayal of women has been regarded as a reflection of a culture in which women sought increasing “masculine” qualities, such as independence and power in the workplace and home, it is now widely read as sexist representation. However, Kesey did not intend to suggest that women were solely responsible for dehumanization; rather, Cuckoo’s Nest also focuses on the degradation of society and the individual as a result of alienation from nature. Bromden in particular, whose childhood memories are fi lled with recollections of the natural world, relies on communion with nature in order to maintain his sanity. At the beginning of the novel, Bromden lives in a world clouded by a fog machine created by his own paranoia, as well as his convoluted memories of his time as a soldier. As he regains his sense of self, the fog begins to fade. He begins to reunite with nature, fi rst by looking out his window for the fi rst time in a long while to watch a dog run around the grounds of the hospital and then by venturing outside the hospital with several of the men, led by McMurphy, on a fishing trip. In the end, Bromden is capable of lifting a heavy control panel and throwing it through the window, fi nally leaving the hospital and reuniting with the outside world. Bromden’s escape suggests Kesey’s alliance with an activist reaction to oppression, and in turn, his movement away from existing literary models. As a writer during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kesey was situated near the end of what was called the “Beat generation.” The Beats were writers who felt ostracized from mainstream American culture,

which in their minds sought to eliminate individuality and convert creative people into automatons. This ideology is clearly evident in Cuckoo’s Nest, a tale of men repressed by a symbolic mental hospital. At the same time, though, the Beats’ solution to the problem was withdrawing from society and remaining in bohemian communities. Kesey, though, created characters like McMurphy, whose incendiary actions eventually stir up enough trouble that several men are able to escape the hospital system, whether they run away as Bromden does or sign out legitimately as Harding does. His movement away from pessimistic complacency and toward rebellious action helped to instigate a shift in 1960s counterculture and contributed to the great success of Cuckoo’s Nest with younger student readers. Another, perhaps more progressive, allusion to the Beats is Kesey’s invocation of the American transcendentalists. The transcendentalists believed in the sanctity of nature, coupled with the triumph of the individual spirit. Walt Whitman, through whom transcendentalism was fi ltered to Beat writers like A LLEN GINSBERG, also added the glorification of the physical body, which Kesey adopted as part of McMurphy’s character. For instance, after McMurphy takes his fi rst shower in the hospital and is walking around in a towel, Nurse Ratched confronts his nudity with disgust. She, on the other hand, dresses so as to conceal her large breasts, and the patients interpret her resulting sexual unavailability, her coldness, as an expression of the inhuman institution itself. Kesey also interprets transcendentalist ideals in his focus on the role and responsibilities of the traditional hero, both in Cuckoo’s Nest and in his later novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. As does Notion’s Hank Stamper, McMurphy prides himself on his staunch individuality, even at the expense of his own physical and emotional well-being. Unlike the transcendentalists, though, who pulled their heroic models from classical myth, Kesey’s heroes resemble those of superhero comic books, western movies, and other elements of American popular culture. At the close of the patients’ party in the ward, Harding references the

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Lone Ranger as he speaks of McMurphy’s fleeing the ward, saying, “I’d like to stand there at that window with a silver bullet in my hand and ask, ‘Who wawz that’er masked man?’ as you ride—” The alliance of Kesey’s characters with such heroes and villains allows their confl icts to be simplified into epic battles of good versus evil. Furthermore, Kesey validates the inclusion of popular culture references in an allegedly highbrow art form and allows the reader to experience some of his early childhood literary influences, such as Marvel comics and the adventure stories of writers like Zane Grey. Kesey also grew up under the influence of Protestant Christianity, and its effects are evident in McMurphy’s role as a Christ-like savior. Throughout the novel, McMurphy’s fellow patients are transformed from awed onlookers to devoted disciples, who turn to him to be saved. As with Christ, McMurphy’s actions lead him to sacrifice; as McMurphy undergoes shock treatment, he even uses the language of crucifi xion, saying to the technician as graphite salve is applied to his temples, “Anointest my head with conductant. Do I get a crown of thorns?” And after recovering from shock treatments, Bromden, the mute whom McMurphy has made able to speak, returns to the ward proclaiming McMurphy’s heroism. In the end, McMurphy’s loss of life, as a result of both his lobotomy and his later mercy killing by Bromden, allows the other patients to have real and fulfi lling lives. At the time of its publication, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest received mostly favorable reviews and was adapted into a play in 1963 by Dale Wasserman. In 1975, Milos Forman directed the fi lm version, which won Academy Awards for best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best actor (Jack Nicholson), and best actress (Louise Fletcher). Kesey wrote a screenplay for the fi lm, but Forman rejected it, stating that he did not believe that Bromden’s narration would translate well to the screen. Kesey then rejected the fi lm and vowed never to watch it. His novel, though, still generates much critical attention and is widely taught as part of the American literary canon. It remains in print

in several editions, including one in the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century series. It retains its revolutionary power and continues to influence readers and writers alike.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Within the fi rst few pages of the novel, Bromden recounts, “It’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.” In literary studies, the term unreliable narrator refers to a narrator whose credibility is compromised for any of a number of reasons, such as bias, naivete, or lack of knowledge. Discuss how Bromden may be read as an unreliable narrator, providing specific examples from the novel. 2. Contemporary readers sometimes consider One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest to be a racist novel. Discuss how nonwhite characters are represented differently from white characters in the novel, particularly Bromden and the black “boys.” 3. The fi lm version of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest has become very successful in its own right, although Kesey himself condemned it. Compare the fi lm version to the novel. How does the story change without Bromden’s narration? 4. Kesey’s experimentation with drugs was an important influence on him as he was writing One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. However, he also had experience working in a mental hospital, where drugs are used in very different ways. How are drugs and drug use represented in the novel? 5. Some scholars suggest that connections exist between Cuckoo’s Nest and Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick (1851). Identify allusions to Melville’s novel and discuss why Kesey may have included them.

Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) Sometimes a Great Notion was published in 1964, just two years after Kesey’s fi rst novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In his second published novel, Kesey attempts a much more complicated literary work, writing more than 628 pages, which use

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multiple narrative techniques and points of view. Soon after the publication of Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey spent four months in the coastal town of Florence, Oregon, living and socializing with the loggers there in order to familiarize himself with their jargon and daily routine as research for Notion. The story takes place in the 1960s in a small town near the Oregon coast, where one family collides with the local union (and many of the townspeople) as they resist participation in a logging strike. The Stamper family, headed by the patriarchal figures Henry and his son Hank, refuse to strike because of their fiercely individualistic values. These values indicate one of the major themes in both of Kesey’s major novels: the struggle to find a balance between the individual and larger society. As the novel opens, the Stamper logging team, composed of Henry, Hank, and Hank’s cousin Joe Ben, struggles to fulfi ll a contract. Henry has injured his arm and is barely able to work, and the rest of the loggers in town are on strike. Rather than caving in to their seeming inability to complete the task, the Stampers write to seek help from Leland (“Lee”) Stamper, Henry’s son and Hank’s younger half brother, who is in graduate school at Yale University. Lee’s return begins the central action in the novel, that of the developing relationship between Hank and Lee. This relationship is complicated by Lee’s knowledge that his mother, who committed suicide a year earlier, had an affair with Hank during his teenage years. In a twist on the Oedipal relationship, Lee attempts to exact retribution by seducing Hank’s wife, Viv, so that he might transfer the burden of knowledge to Hank. The novel climaxes in a logging accident, which results in the deaths of both Henry and Joe Ben, as well Lee’s concurrent seduction of Viv. Additionally, Viv’s increasing awareness of the tension in the relationship of Hank and Lee prompts her fi nally to leave both of them to start her life over. The falling action highlights Hank’s role as the traditional hero in the novel. As McMurphy does for Bromden in Cuckoo’s Nest, Hank assumes the responsibility of leading another man, in this case, Lee, to full understanding of his capacities as a human being. As does Bromden, Lee lives in a “fog” of his own creation

and requires a model of individualism to free him. Kesey uses imagery of bigness (complete with its phallic connotations) to suggest power; the physical size of the Stampers is related to their manhood. The symbol for Hank’s stature throughout the novel is the tree, appropriate because of his profession as a logger and because of its phallic associations. Just before the novel’s close, though, Lee notices that he is “a good two inches” taller than Hank, thus symbolizing the completion of his self-actualization. Again like Bromden, who realizes his own massive size at the end of Cuckoo’s Nest and lifts the control panel in order to escape the hospital, Lee finds himself capable of rising above his complicated history when he becomes aware of his bigness. Still, Hank proves himself as the novel’s hero in the traditional Greek sense as he survives challenges on various levels. At the start of the novel, he must put himself to the test physically, attempting to do more work than he is capable of doing. He faces pressure from the society around him, as his neighbors urge him to join the strike. Finally, he is tested emotionally, as he is faced with losing his father, his cousin (who is like a brother to him), and his wife, all at about the same time. However, he does not allow the trials to break him. The Stamper motto is “Never give an inch,” and Hank remains true until the end, when he and Lee fi nally jointly attempt the seemingly impossible task of floating all of their logs. They even go so far as to hang Henry’s amputated arm from a pole in front of the Stamper house, complete with all the fi ngers tied down except the middle, exhibiting Kesey’s characteristic humor in the face of adversity. Setting plays a crucial role in Notion. In addition to providing the appropriate scene for the logging confl ict, it sets the stage for Kesey to work out one of his major thematic quandaries: How do time and place (particularly as it relates to nature) contribute to human character and destiny? In his epic narrative, Kesey attempts to explore those intimate relationships, stating that his intent in the novel was to portray “a man, a family, a town, a country, and a time.” Such ambitious goals lend a mythical proportion to the novel, one that may be compared to Greek tragedy.

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This comparison is supplemented by his continuing concern with the responsibility of the hero, and the shift in Notion to a more individualized conception (as opposed to the savior figure in Cuckoo’s Nest) also demonstrates Kesey’s engagement with the ideals of the American transcendentalists. Hank embodies the fiercely individualistic values of figures like Emerson and Thoreau, and in his unfl inching truth to his own self, he ultimately benefits others. The transcendentalists believed that reliance on the self eventually, and perhaps paradoxically, led to gain in the community, and Hank’s eventual triumph (and the benefits reaped in particular by Lee) suggests Kesey’s alliance with that ideal. Also, Hank communes on an almost spiritual level with nature while remaining constantly aware of its power; although the landscape is his home and livelihood, it also has the physical power to destroy his family. Finally, invoking the transcendentalists reflects Kesey’s homage to the Beat writers, who frequently cited the movement as a major inspiration. While the universal themes of Notion are infinitely complex, they can often be simplified as variations on the theme of good versus evil. Kesey highlights this epic battle using the language of superhero comic books, which were both entertainment for him as a child and a major part of American culture. Kesey often alludes to Captain Marvel in discussions of Hank, thus equating him not only with the heroes of ancient Greek literature, but also those of contemporary American popular culture. Thus, Kesey, a mastermind of American culture himself, situates his novel both within long-standing literary tradition and within the traditions of which he is inextricably a part.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The title of Sometimes a Great Notion is taken from the lines in an American folk standard, “Sometimes I get a great notion / To jump into the river . . . an’ drown.” What is the significance of this title, and why might Kesey have chosen it? 2. Kesey, in many ways, follows in the footsteps of William Faulkner, another regional writer

whose innovative style won him great acclaim. Kesey has often cited Faulkner as an influence on his work. Compare Sometimes a Great Notion to As I Lay Dying (1930), looking particularly at points of view and their effect on the narrative. 3. In an interview published in Kesey’s Garage Sale, Kesey writes, “Women’s Lib was the real issue in Notion. I didn’t know this when I wrote it, but think about it: It’s about men matching egos and wills on the battleground of Vivian’s unconsulted hide. When she leaves at the end of the book, she chooses to leave the only people she loves for a bleak and uncertain but at the least equal future” (218). Consider Sometimes a Great Notion within the context of feminism, which locates and critiques instances of gender inequality in texts and seeks to topple oppressive gender stereotypes. Can Notion be read as a feminist novel? 4. Since setting plays such a major role in Sometimes a Great Notion, non-Oregonian characters are often completely ostracized. Look in particular at Viv, who is not native to Oregon, and Lee, who has left the area for many years to live in the eastern part of the country. In what ways does dislocation affect these characters?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON KESEY AND HIS WORK 1. In The Art of Grit, the critic M. Gilbert Porter writes that in Sometimes a Great Notion, there exists “a density of texture and a realistic richness of character frequently missing in Cuckoo’s Nest.” Compare and contrast the character development in each of the novels and support or challenge Porter’s opinion. 2. Stephen Tanner calls Kesey the “psychedelic impresario in the transition from Beats to Hippies.” Where is the influence of the Beat generation writers visible in Kesey’s work, both in his style and in his philosophy? Where can the reader see him move forward and away from Beat techniques and attitudes?

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3. In both Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, one man stands out as the traditional hero. However, in both of the novels, other major characters demonstrate heroic qualities, among them the capacity to change and grow and compassion toward others. Defend one of Kesey’s other characters as the hero of the novel, such as Lee in Notion or Bromden in Cuckoo’s Nest. 4. Both of Kesey’s major novels emphasize individual strength rather than collective action. Consider this ideal within the context of America in the 1960s, especially in light of the antiwar and Civil Rights movements. 5. While Nurse Ratched’s representation in Cuckoo’s Nest is frequently referred to as sexist, some suggest that Viv in Notion is a well-developed female character. Discuss how Kesey portrays women in each of his novels. Are his characterizations more progressive in Notion? WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein & Day, 1968. Kappel, Lawrence. Readings on One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2000. Kesey, Ken. Demon Box. New York: Viking, 1986. ———. The Further Inquiry. New York: Viking, 1990. ———. Kesey’s Garage Sale. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. Kesey’s Jail Journal: Cut the M************ Loose. New York: Viking, 2003. ———. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Penguin, 1962. ———. Sometimes a Great Notion. New York: Penguin, 1964. Leeds, Barry. Ken Kesey. New York: Unger, 1981.

McClanahan, Ed. Spit in the Ocean #7: All about Kesey. New York: Penguin, 2003. Porter, M. Gilbert. The Art of Grit: Ken Kesey’s Fiction. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. ———. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Rising to Heroism. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Psychedelic 60s: Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. February 22, 1999. Available online. URL: http:// www.lib.virginia.edu/small/exhibits/sixties/kesey. html. Accessed October 25, 2006. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century, 1945 to the Present—Ken Kesey.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http:// www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/ kesey.html. Accessed December 9, 2006. Safer, Elaine B. “The Absurd Quest and Black Humor in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.” In The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey. Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1988. Searles, George J. A Casebook on One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Tanner, Stephen L. Ken Kesey. Boston: Twayne, 1983. ———. “The Western American Context of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” In Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, edited by James Barbour and Tom Quirk, 291–320. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Tanner, Tony. “Edge City (Ken Kesey).” In City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Wolfe, Tom. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Bantam Books, 1999.

Caitlin Shanley

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) The democratic ideal of freedom and equality will be fulfilled for all—or all human beings will share in the resulting social and spiritual doom. In short, this crisis has the potential for democracy’s fulfillment or fascism’s triumph; for social progress or retrogression. We can choose either to walk the high road of human brotherhood or to tread the low road of man’s inhumanity to man. (Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story)

M

artin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. His paternal grandfather had been a sharecropper while his maternal grandfather headed Atlanta’s black uppermiddle-class Ebenezer Baptist Church. Martin’s father, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., and mother, the schoolteacher Alberta Williams King, raised him and his siblings (Alberta and Alfred) in the “sweet Auburn” neighborhood of Atlanta. Martin went to college through an early-admission program aimed at high school sophomores and juniors. If a student did well on entrance examinations, admission was granted to either Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, or Morehouse College in Atlanta. Martin was admitted in 1944 to Morehouse when he was 15 years old. By 19 he had been ordained as a Baptist minister. After his ordination, King held the position of copastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church until his death 20 years later. After majoring in sociology at Morehouse, King was accepted by Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor of divinity degree in 1951. That same year he entered Boston University’s Graduate School of Theology, where he was awarded the Ph.D. degree in systemic theology in 1955. His dissertation was entitled “A Comparison of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Wiseman.” While working on his doctorate, King met Coretta Scott, a graduate of Antioch College in Ohio, who was study-

ing at the New England Conservatory of Music. Though she studied in the North, her roots were in rural Alabama. They were married in 1953 and subsequently had four children, Yolanda, Martin Luther III, Dexter, and Bernice. The Kings relocated to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954 while Martin was still completing his doctorate, and he became the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, a position he retained until 1959. On December 5, 1955, only six months after receiving his doctoral degree, he was elected president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). This group had been formed after the December 1 arrest of Rosa Parks, who was famously charged with violating the city’s segregation ordinances. At the age of 27, King found himself at the center of national attention as African Americans organized to support Rosa Parks and oppose segregation in Montgomery. After a year of economic pressure on public transportation and downtown businesses, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Montgomery’s ordinances could not be used to segregate the races, ruling them unconstitutional. In 1957 King formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a regional organization whose purpose was to fight segregation throughout the South using nonviolent strategies such as economic boycotts and picket lines. In addition, King intended the SCLC to act as

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a means through which various religious, social, and political groups could coordinate efforts and present unified opposition to segregation. In order to help galvanize support for future efforts, King wrote his fi rst book, Stride toward Freedom (1958), a chronicle of how “Jim Crow” segregation laws had been defeated in Montgomery. In this work, King describes the difficulties in coordinating a massive movement, one guided by a basic philosophy: This guiding principle has since been referred to variously as nonviolent resistance, noncooperation, and passive resistance. But in the fi rst days of the protest none of these expressions was mentioned; the phrase most often heard was “Christian love.” It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action.

It is almost unthinkable when reading such words to imagine that, during a book signing at a New York department store in September 1958, a mentally deranged woman stabbed King in the chest with a letter opener, nearly killing him. King would frequently say for years afterward that the physicians who tended to his wound told him that had he sneezed, he would have severed his aorta and internally bled to death. During his recovery, King sojourned to India for further study of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s philosophy and practice of nonviolent protest. A major figure in India’s spiritual and political history, Gandhi championed nonviolent protest against British colonial oppression, helping lead the nation to independence in 1948. The experience was a formative one that underscores the importance of Gandhi’s example to King’s project in the South. As he describes in “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi”: “While the Montgomery boycott was going on, India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change” (Ebony July 1959). When he returned, King followed the footsteps of his grandfather, moving to Atlanta in 1960 to become copastor of Ebenezer Baptist

Church and direct the activities of the SCLC. Here King ardently advocated the use of nonviolent protest by African-American communities, a strategy that had been employed the previous February in Greensboro, North Carolina. His participation in “sit-ins” at Atlanta eateries resulted in his arrest and a four-month jail sentence. King was subsequently released, but only after the intervention of President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The organizations that supported the SCLC and its nonviolent assault against segregation in the South varied a great deal from each other. Among them were the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”), the Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the National Council of Negro Women. Each was led by strong and talented activists who often challenged the wisdom of adhering to the SCLC’s pacifist philosophy and exclusive use of nonviolent means. These tensions within the leadership of King’s organization were matched by logistical difficulties and a lack of resources. A COREled demonstration tested the ability of the SCLC under King to provide support for its members. In 1961, a CORE faction organized students to ride buses through the South defiantly, violating the Jim Crow ordinances and statutes of several states. Even though King supported the “Freedom Riders,” his endorsement was not much use without the assistance of the NAACP’s legal teams: All of their lawyers were needed to defend individuals who had been arrested for testing the 1957 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned segregation on interstate transportation. Even though the protesters succeeded in gaining federal protection, it was not until the bonds of cooperation among civil rights groups had been severely strained. King tempered his need for action with both the NAACP’s preference for litigation and the local Christian churches’ and more conservative group’s need for gradual change. Even though King was frequently accused of being an “outside agitator,” he was prepared to respond by

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reminding critics of his southern roots and bases of operation. In Albany, Georgia, though, King experienced frustration and defeat as local authorities withstood the efforts of SNCC, the SCLC, and others. Throughout 1962 the Albany campaign used sit-ins, voter registration drives, and picket lines to push local officials to desegregate public facilities. Hundreds were arrested, including King. National media attention waned and federal support faltered as the protesters were routinely arrested and sequestered. A shaky truce was reached when local officials agreed to abide by federal laws. However, where federal guidelines were absent and local authority remained effective, officials chose to close public facilities rather than make them equally accessible to African Americans. The year 1963, though, proved to be a pivotal year in the life of Reverend King and the nation. The events surrounding King included the assassinations of Medgar Evers and President Kennedy, the murder of civil rights workers, and bombings that killed four little girls in Birmingham. In 1964, the nation witnessed the largest demonstration for civil rights in history as activists descended on Washington, D.C. The meaning of these events for King was significant. Assassination as a political tool was to be used against him five years later. The violence used by racists to thwart the activities of pacifi sts was to be counterbalanced by those refusing to continue to turn the other cheek. SNCC, the Deacons for Defense, and others, were to respond with reciprocal defensive violence as they vocally rejected the leadership of Reverend King and his proscriptions. The effectiveness of mass demonstrations began to be questioned as civil rights organizations could no longer agree to unify their efforts despite their philosophical differences happened after the 1965 voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama. But King could still look back at 1963 as a banner year for successes: The Birmingham campaign not only defeated the strong-arm tactics of Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor, but also demonstrated on the world stage how repressive and unjust Jim Crow segregation was. However, televising the plight of African-American children being attacked by vicious dogs and men

with fi re hoses was not enough. The Birmingham police and fi re departments also precipitated the writing of one of King’s most important works, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which later was published as a chapter in his third book, Why We Can’t Wait (1964). In the letter King calls upon the Christian community, especially its leadership, its ministers, and its preachers, to act out of love, a universal value that human beings of all different creeds share: Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Birmingham had been called “America’s most segregated city.” The removal of the city’s segregation ordinances in spring 1963 was seen as one of the most important victories in King’s career. But it was bested that summer by what may have been the greatest speech given in the 20th century. In 1963, the march on Washington took place in the nation’s capital with 250,000 people demanding Congress pass a comprehensive civil rights act. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King offered his vision of America’s future in his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, calling for hope and faith and prophesying freedom. Although King’s reputation grew, his street-level activities showed signs of stalling in 1964. In the same year, the SCLC campaign to end segregation in St. Augustine, Florida, which was celebrating its 400th anniversary, was defeated when federal authorities refused to intervene and local officials successfully banned public demonstrations. Also, “Freedom Summer,” the campaign in Mississippi, saw civil rights workers killed as they worked to register voters. King’s ability to coordinate the movement’s chief organizations was also under pressure as the SCLC found itself at odds with SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP. In addition, local politics in Mississippi led by Fannie Lou Hamer challenged

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the conservative leadership of the Democratic Party as delegates were chosen to attend the national convention. Hamer’s Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) confronted the leadership on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. Such efforts represented a breaking away from the traditional actions of the Civil Rights movement. A new era was dawning, and King frequently found himself defending the use of strategies that seemed to be discordant with the times. By 1965, it was apparent that the approach and alliances that had worked for the past 10 years were no longer adequate. The Selma campaign proved to be the last major coordination of mass protest in the civil rights era. On “Bloody Sunday,” March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers met demonstrators led by SNCC on the Edmond Pettus Bridge. Again, with the national press watching, troopers used vicious force to turn back peaceful protesters. The situation proved impossible for the students to accept. After Selma, King’s credibility among students and in the urban North was severely questioned. In 1966, King moved north to Chicago and began to refocus the movement’s emphasis from segregation in the South to poverty throughout the nation. By July, he was calling for an end to discrimination in housing, employment, and education. He was met with violent local resistance. Plagued by setbacks, King left Chicago without tangibly improving the lives of the poor. He did, however, increase national awareness of the economic condition of the poor and its disparity with the overall wealth of the nation. For King, such disparities were immoral, violations of what he increasingly defi ned as human rights. King’s transition in emphasis from civil rights to human rights was to include not just southern African Americans or those living in areas of urban poverty in the North. King also advocated for the destitute populations of various nations in Africa, India, and Asia. The year 1967 saw King’s position shift in other ways, too. He announced his opposition to the war in Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York, a move that many viewed as meddling in affairs too far afield from the fight against racism and poverty. Despite these criticisms, King’s stance on Vietnam

is clearly consistent with his pacifist efforts for the preceding decade. Though King started to speak out on a broader range of issues, he did not lose sight of the plight of the poor: In 1967 he announced the formation of the Poor People’s Campaign, which sought to secure a guaranteed annual minimum income for those unable to work. The campaign also sought to end housing discrimination and the passage of a $12 billion economic bill of rights that guaranteed employment to the able-bodied. In 1968, King traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, in order to support striking sanitation workers, who merely wanted to unionize and have their salaries raised to the federally mandated minimum wage. The march King led through downtown Memphis turned unexpectedly violent as marchers confronted and fought with police. As King regrouped and met with striking families, he urged them to remain nonviolent. For the rally at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple of God in Christ heard King gave his inspiring speech “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” which, in effect, was a fi nal farewell to his followers. It was his last public speech before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, while he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Martin Luther King, Jr., received a great deal of recognition and many awards and honors both during his lifetime and after his death. In 1957, he received several after the success of the Montgomery campaign, winning the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP and being selected by Time magazine as one of the most influential personalities of the year. King also won the Russwurm Award from the National Newspaper Publishers and the Second Annual Achievement Award from the Association of the New York City Police Department. A second wave of recognition for his accomplishments followed the events of 1963. These included being named Man of the Year by Time magazine and being awarded the John Dewey Award from the United Federation of Teachers and the John F. Kennedy Award from the Catholic Interracial Council of Chicago in 1964. King’s highest honor, though, was the Nobel Peace Prize. King was the youngest person ever to receive this presti-

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gious award when it was given to him in 1964. The 35-year-old responded by giving the $54,000 prize money to further the civil rights campaign in the United States. The prize is also noteworthy because of the acceptance speech King gave in Oslo, Norway, upon receiving it. The third wave of recognition was posthumous. In 1968, King was awarded the Marcus Garvey Prize for Human Rights from the government of Jamaica, the Rosa Parks Award from the SCLC, and many others that are archived in Atlanta, Georgia, at the Center for Nonviolent Social Change. The President’s Medal of Freedom was also awarded to King posthumously in 1970. In addition to these personal accolades, King is recognized for his contribution to significant legislative accomplishments. In 1964, Congress passed the most comprehensive protection of civil rights since the Reconstruction era. The Civil Rights Act was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. These three major pieces of legislation were Congress’s confi rmation of Supreme Court decisions that reversed the nation’s long-standing position on the segregation of the races. Currently, Stanford University holds the majority of King’s writings as part of the King Papers Project, whose Internet site is http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/. Since the 1980s, scholars have debated King’s use of scholarly sources. While there seems to be a critical consensus that King’s writings do contain plagiarism, the issue remains what to make of it and how to assess his writings. Perhaps the most balanced view of these issues lies in Clayborne Carson’s assessment from “Editing Martin Luther King, Jr.: Political and Scholarly Issues,” originally published in the Bornstein and Williams book Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), which can be found on the Internet at http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/additional_resources/articles/palimp.htm: What can we conclude, therefore, about the biographical and historical significance of King’s papers? Although I concede that the King Papers Project would not exist if not for

the widespread belief among American elites in the notion that Great Men and their ideas alter the course of history, I suggest that the papers reveal less about King’s impact on the world than about the religions and intellectual influences that shaped his public persona. Documentary editions undoubtedly reinforce the notion that great leaders and their ideas alter the course of history, but they can also become valuable sources of knowledge about the social forces that make possible the emergence of new leaders. Although readers of the King papers will undoubtedly learn more about King, they should not expect his inner mind to be fully revealed through his papers. We must face the possibility that King’s public persona may have obscured aspects of his personality and opinions or that King’s diction served purposes other than to communicate his inner thoughts. Plagiarized academic writings may have been more effective than more original writings in allowing King to play his chosen role as an African-American leader seeking [to] influence white Americans. King used his writings and his speeches and sermons not only to express ideas, but more important, to influence his multiracial audience. King has already been the focus of numerous serious biographical works, but our study of his papers convinces us that he will remain both a compelling and an elusive subject for research for many years to come.

Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958) Stride toward Freedom, King’s fi rst book, is an account of what happened during the Montgomery bus boycott. In it, King discusses in detail the events that led up to and constituted the yearlong boycott of the city’s bus system. Even though he was only 27 when elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), King wrote Stride with the wisdom of someone much older. His discussion of the MIA and the forces in opposition to its goals was (and still is)

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instructive for those wanting to employ nonviolent direct action to effect social change; it was a model for future boycotts across the South. More importantly, Stride toward Freedom is an explanation of why the boycott happened. To this end, King explains the philosophy that justified the actions in Montgomery, mixing accounts of day-to-day happenings with a description of the evolution of his own ideas regarding the practical application of pacifism. King detailed the tenets of nonviolent direct action, allowing them to be used by others seeking to change Jim Crow segregation laws. These principles were the core of King’s public actions for the rest of his life. It was in Montgomery, though, where they were fi rst tested and witnessed by the nation. As Stride toward Freedom tells us, the fi rst step in this approach to social change is for injustice to be thoroughly documented: The problem must be clearly established and understood. According to King, injustice is easily identifiable, for it assaults the dignity of those it oppresses. Fundamentally evil in nature, injustice humiliates and degrades individuals. King then calls for constructive negotiation, an informed exchange between the oppressed and the oppressor, one predicated on open dialogue rather than force or coercion. In these exchanges, King calls for the parties concerned to identify “immoral behavior.” Often, however, those who perpetuate injustice are unwilling to accept change. At this point, King demands that each individual must commit himself or herself to practicing passive resistance. Passive resistance does not, for King, mean docility. Nor does it mean doing nothing. He describes it as active intervention designed to advance justice, intervention that must always proceed out of love, never hate. Following the example of Jesus and Gandhi—his two great teachers—King believed that only by actually living a philosophy based on love could human beings realize their full potential. For King, violence and hate emanate from our base nature, one above which we must rise, responding to the call of love, and acting in the world. This process of moving toward nonviolent action was tempered by King’s cautionary warning to potential activists about the dangers and consequences of

civil disobedience: Participants must be willing to pay the price for their actions. There must be full awareness of the likely outcomes so that individuals will be prepared for whatever sacrifice is demanded of them. King’s book describes examples experienced in Montgomery at each of these stages. The names and places of those who participated are given so that the nation can see that everyday people can bring about significant social change.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What negative consequences could result from the publication of MIA specifics such as the identities of participants and their tactics? Any positive consequences? 2. After the publication of this book King was stabbed and nearly killed. Predict his response to his attacker on the basis of what is advocated in this book. 3. To understand what it was like to live under the Jim Crow laws that King and his followers fought so hard against, read R ALPH ELLISON’s Invisible Man (1952), an earlier work that describes both the Jim Crow South and the black fl ight to the North. Next, consult the following Web site and read the reviews of the novel there: http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/resources/lessonplans/amlit_lp_ellison.htm. With all three reviews of the novel in mind, write a well-developed essay that evaluates each review in light of Jim Crow segregation. If both Ellison and King articulate the many dehumanizing aspects of this practice, why did the American public let it continue for so long? Support everything you say with quotes from King’s speech, the novel, and these reviews.

“I Have a Dream” (1963) This speech was given on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for jobs and freedom. With a civil rights bill before Congress, 250,000 people gathered before the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to advocate its passage. At this highly anticipated event, throughout the day King cited

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several important reasons why Congress should continue what the Supreme Court had initiated with their historic decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. Many have considered this speech to be one of the greatest speeches given during the 20th century. King’s impressive oratory uses techniques commonly found in sermons to advance his political cause. We can listen to this and other King speeches on the many sites with King audio fi les on the Internet, such as History and Politics Out Loud: http://www.hpol.org/ record.php?id=72. As one can discern when listening to the speech, the pace of King’s delivery ebbs and flows as he weaves an account of the historical events that made the March on Washington possible. Even the modulation of his voice changes as he emphasizes points: King uses a gentle but emphatic tone to describe his children and then smoothly transitions to a harsh voice when he refers to southern officials as they use “nullification and interposition” as justifications for fighting desegregation. When we listen to King’s speeches, we can understand how King used the technique of “call and response”—a tradition that African bondsmen and women took to the New World, one transmitted over centuries and manifesting itself in various forms of expression, including religious observance and public gatherings and in black music—to move his audience from merely listening to actually participating. As the listeners become enraptured participants, comments can be heard as King pauses. “All right now,” “Amen,” and “Yeah, that’s right” echo in the background. At the speech’s conclusion King’s use of this rhetorical technique, refi ned over his years in the pulpit, succeeds in inciting the audience to anticipate his words, nearly drowning out his own voice—as they recite with him a stanza from a well-known Negro spiritual. Not only does King deliver “I Have a Dream” in a style familiar to members of the black church, but also he speaks from a perspective common among African Americans, and not unknown to whites as well. Using the conventions of a Baptist preacher, King recalls biblical scenes in which God communicated with patriarchs. For example, King employs

Joseph’s prophetic dream of seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine, which allowed Egypt to prepare for and eventually avoid disaster. He also references Jacob’s dream of climbing a ladder used by angels to go back and forth to heaven, allowing him to see that God would not leave him alone to face his challenges. King also drew parallels between his own position and that of Moses, whose vision of the land of milk and honey allowed him the satisfaction of knowing that he had led his people to the promised land. King used these and other Christian images to remind the audience that, as a leader deeply influenced by biblical teachings, he was not acting solely of his own volition. In effect, King stated that the March on Washington and the entire Civil Rights movement were under divine direction and, as such, would be blessed with a victorious outcome if they remained true to their faith. But it must also be remembered that this was a diverse audience. King understood that solely depending on references that would resonate only with black and white Christians could not unify such a gathering. Thus, King blended these references with others rooted in more commonly held beliefs. Appealing to his audience’s patriotism, King insisted that the United States was founded on the principles he and the Civil Rights movement were fighting for, principles that applied to all Americans—and all peoples. King refers throughout the speech to the great American experiment fi rst initiated with the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. From the declaration he recited the fundamental assumption that the United States was founded on—“We hold these truths to be selfevident: that all men are created equal.” From the Constitution, King recited its assurance “that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Invoking the fundamental tenets of American political philosophy lends King’s oratory great power. King saw no contradiction between the political goals of the Civil Rights movement and his role as a Christian, spiritual leader. By the end of the speech, he combines these two in stating that a part of his dream for the nation’s future is that one day “all

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of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My Country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’ ” Such fervent patriotism rhetorically reminded his listeners that King’s spiritually moving dream for the nation was the dream the nation had for itself. Fittingly, freedom is a recurrent theme throughout the speech, as it is central to both the Civil Rights movement and the nation’s very existence. As King’s speech makes clear, freedom must be realized in every region, for everyone. For King, freedom means having full citizenship in a system that is just and provides equal opportunity for all. It is important to note that in 1963 the nation had not dealt with racial bigotry, with many citizens still believing that blacks genetically were inferior to whites and that their position in society should reflect these differences. It was practically impossible for African Americans to vote in most of the South. It was not possible for a motorist to stay in any hotel, eat at any restaurant, or use any public facility without fi rst heeding signs that specified which conveniences were for blacks and which were for whites. In the speech, King identified southern states as not being places of freedom for blacks. He challenged his audience to go to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana and work for change. For southerners this was outrageous. “Outside agitators” and “communists” were seen as the root cause of much of the disruption of the southern way of life. For King to recommend that individuals and organizations enter local communities and work for freedom was insulting to “southern traditions.” This call to action further confi rmed southern suspicions when King recounted his dream of the future, a dream where “little black boys and black girls will be able to join little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.” For many, this vision fueled prejudiced fears of interracial marriage. Marriage and sex across the color line were unthinkably offensive to many people at the time: Polls showed a large majority of white Americans opposed full social and political integration. King’s fellow marchers, however, dis-

agreed. By the conclusion of the speech, they had become participants in the delivery as they voiced their agreement and support of King’s vision. King ended by noting that freedom would ring regardless of what obstacles lay before it. He chose the national anthem’s references to mountainsides to illustrate again where freedom was most needed.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In the same year that King gave this speech, M ALCOLM X gave a speech that, when compared with “I Have a Dream,” seems a nightmarish vision of America. Read Malcolm X’s God’s Judgment of White America, thinking about these ideas in terms of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Then, write a well-developed essay comparing the two speeches that argues which is more convincing and why. 2. Research the March on Washington where King delivered his address, using a trustworthy source of information (such as the Web site for the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, which can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/group/ King/encyclopedia/index.htm). What were the responses of the President and Congress to the march and to the speech? Were any of the demands of the marchers met?

“Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963) An open letter written in response to criticisms leveled by eight white clergymen, King published this piece in a Birmingham newspaper to defend his calls for civil disobedience. When he composed the letter, Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor had arrested him for protesting segregation in the city. When King wrote this essay, most of the South as well as most of America remained unconvinced that Jim Crow–style segregation should be ended. Even President John F. Kennedy, a northern liberal, had not emphatically moved to support the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision nationwide, opting only to act in jurisdictions facing emergencies as protesters were openly attacked and

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arrested by officials refusing to desegregate. In Birmingham, King sought to create another such circumstance. Even many African Americans were not convinced that King was correct to advocate such fundamental changes in race relations: Participating in street protests was dangerous and could result in retaliation from the white community. Being “blacklisted” could mean unemployment, foreclosure, eviction, or worse. Many who lived in the South personally knew of individuals who had been subjected to the “justice” of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization infamous for burning and bombing homes, flogging protest instigators, or even lynching participants. Another reason why many African Americans resisted King’s plan for ending segregation was rooted in history: Fifty years earlier Booker T. Washington had taught the principles of “accommodationism,” arguing that African Americans should not prioritize the attainment of equal political or social status with that of whites. Instead, African Americans should focus on proving themselves as valuable assets to their regions. In their doing so, whites would gladly accept blacks as members of the community. According to this philosophy, forcing integration on whites through the law or through social action would only retard progress that would otherwise occur if blacks would just work hard and be patient. Even in Washington’s day, the majority of southern whites agreed with accommodationism: If blacks could “know their place,” then the southern way of life could continue. Believers in accommodationism saw King as an outside agitator, suspecting him of being influenced by communist agents. In the paranoid and suspicious climate of cold war America, a climate that had given rise to numerous communist witch hunts, such charges were taken seriously. In addition to these concerns, some of King’s fellow clergymen had denounced him: Numerous ministers, bishops, and a rabbi signed an open letter stating that he had overstepped his place. According to these men, to be involved with acts that precipitated violence and to make radical demands that bypassed the courts and legislatures were not the roles of a Christian pastor. They held that the

tenets of accommodationism agreed with the principles of gradual social reform held by many whites. Gradualists felt that, given sufficient time, race relations would improve and that this slow evolutionary process could not be forced. Sheriff “Bull” Connor enforced such beliefs, ordering his police officers to confront protesters with billy clubs and vicious dogs. The Birmingham Fire Department joined in, using their high-pressure fi re hoses to wash the streets clean of protesters. The world and the U.S. citizenry watched in horror as pictures aired every evening on the national and international news. Even with his own community divided, King persisted. At the nadir of the confrontation, just as most of his followers were being arrested, and the tide of local opinion seemed to be against him, King abruptly joined the marchers and was arrested. King was arrested 29 times throughout his career. Each time, especially in Alabama under sheriffs like “Bull” Connor, it was feared he would meet with a fatal accident. Despite these dangers, King was determined to persuade others to join the protests. The rhetoric used in this essay is often cited as an exemplar of persuasive writing and the powerful effect it can have. King recognized that he had several audiences and used logic and evidence to reach each one, targeting clergymen, African Americans in Birmingham, white moderate sympathizers, and the global community. A Christian minister fi rst and a trained theologian, King followed the Bible’s precepts, applying them to his life and using them as the basis for his actions. Accordingly, he opened his response by criticizing his fellow men of the cloth with references to biblical settings, asking them to contemplate what would have happened if Jesus Christ had accepted the Greco-Roman world’s status quo. What would have happened if Jesus Christ had seen himself as an outsider to the concerns of those who did not live in Nazareth? What meaning, King asks, would the gospel have if Jesus had been restricted to his hometown? King applies such logic to his presence in Birmingham, stressing the interrelatedness of all communities. For King, to be idle while people are treated badly

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is immoral: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Throughout his letter, King cites evidence of the use of overwhelming force as well as subversion of the law and Constitutional guarantees to support his logic. Chief among the evidence he cites is the use of violence against the black community repeatedly throughout history, referring to examples from 340 years of race relations. The legacy of this history of violence, slavery, and forced segregation has resulted in despair, humiliation, and fear. And it was being used again against peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham. Rather than complimenting law enforcement officers for maintaining order, King maintained, critics should, instead, witness their brutality against children and the elderly. He thoroughly describes the abusive and intolerable nature of the institution of segregation along with those enforcing it. King wanted to leave his readers with no middle ground to retreat to: Put simply, King implied that either you oppose segregation and support others who oppose it, or you tolerate it and thereby support the segregationists and their evils. King tempered his call for immediate mass action, making it clear that significant danger faced those who opposed the status quo. A commitment to the Civil Rights movement required that participants have full knowledge of the significance their subsequent actions may have. Civil disobedience required individuals to accept consequences, a fact that made the title of King’s letter so pointed. King wrote from a Birmingham jail knowing that he was at his jailers’ mercy. This strengthened King’s position in the eyes of his audience, who knew that he was personally willing to pay the price for freedom. Another salient point that should be noted in reading “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is King’s extended criticism of white moderates. For a man in King’s position, it was easy to respond to the unjust actions and policies of segregationists. Responding to his community’s hesitation, as they weighed the dangers of joining the protests, was more difficult.

But it was much more difficult simultaneously to criticize and to appeal to those who occupied the middle ground, black and white citizens who were unwilling to take action and yet vital to the success of the Civil Rights movement. The middle ground is often seen as the place most in need of positive influence by exerting moral pressure on it. King did just that. He spent a significant portion of the essay calling out whites who saw themselves as generally supportive of desegregation but against immediate action. He attacked whites who favored arguments in favor of gradualism for their willingness to accept conditions for blacks that they would never tolerate for themselves. King demands in his letter that these people explain what constitutes “well timed” social change: When, according to their evolutionary time frame, can blacks be considered fully human? How much patience can the impoverished have when they are surrounded by affluence? As King succinctly observes: “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” Citing Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, and Jesus Christ as historical examples of “extremists” who took active measures during difficult times to effect lasting, positive social change, King insisted enacting change meant confronting injustice. King was also harsh in his assessment of the institutions white moderates supported, claiming that the churches, synagogues, city offices, and law enforcement agencies they depended on did not deserve their trust and support. By indicting these institutions, King challenged more than white moderate complacency. For King, laws are not worthy of obedience if they perpetuate injustice. Such laws, according to King, are evil. This evil, King insists, must be confronted. Again, King left no middle ground for readers. King was also very much aware of the international audience witnessing the disruptions in Birmingham: Foreign journalists from news agencies around the world reported on the events in Alabama. The government of the Soviet Union said that such discriminatory treatment revealed the hypocrisy of America’s foreign policy

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stance, which purportedly championed freedom and democracy around the world. Throughout Europe, the events in Birmingham were perceived as symptoms of an archaic and unjust social hierarchy that should have been dismantled long ago. In Johannesburg, South Africa, nationalist groups to oppose apartheid in South Africa adopted the nonviolent approach of the Civil Rights movement. King’s letter and the Birmingham protests that it was born of became international topics of discussion. Many of these dialogues concerned whether the United States—a nation that allowed systematic violations of civil rights—could claim to be a moral force in the international community. For many around the world, King’s writings and actions in Birmingham confi rmed the stereotypes they had of southerners’ being bigoted and ignorant. Conversely, there were brutal responses to King’s work and his message in South Africa, where South African police shot and killed nonviolent demonstrators inspired by King.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Contrast King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” with Malcolm X’s “The Afro-American’s Right to Self Defense” speech. In these seminal works, both thinkers explain and justify their methods of furthering civil rights. After reading both, write a well-developed essay that considers which argument is the stronger and why. Whose rhetoric is more persuasive? Whose ideas are more applicable today? 2. King encouraged elementary and high school students to join the demonstrators. If you were a teacher, what would you have said to parents? What would you have said to the administrators for whom you worked? 3. Birmingham’s response during the demonstrations damaged U.S. national interests abroad. Was this sufficient cause for federal intervention? What other reasons might have been used to allow the president to intervene in Birmingham? 4. Are there conditions today that call for civil disobedience? If so, argue persuasively for it.

Why We Can’t Wait (1964) Written at the height of the Civil Rights movement and of King’s fame (King was proclaimed Man of the Year by Time magazine on January 3, 1964; in December of that year he received the Nobel Prize for peace), Why We Can’t Wait recounts the efforts to desegregate Birmingham, the coordinated efforts of 1963 that were televised across the nation and throughout the world. In addition to reestablishing the grounds for his approach, King refi nes the ideas he fi rst articulated in Stride toward Freedom. For example, rather than explore the philosophical and practical expressions of passive resistance, King answers critics and addresses concrete issues. King did not educate the reading public about civil disobedience. Instead, he defended its use. His audiences included many of those who questioned the efficacy of prayer, love, and pacifi sm as a means of resistance. In Why We Can’t Wait and in his later work Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos and Community? (1967), King employs the Exodus event during which the Israelites fled from their Egyptian oppressors as a metaphor for the Civil Rights movement, offering nonviolent solutions to social injustice. King responded to critics—including segregationists, white racists, white moderates, black nationalists, and various civil rights organizations—with passionate, informed responses. The title of this book, Why We Can’t Wait, provided a different answer to each of these groups. For those opposed to segregation, it was an immediate response to their threats and acts of violence. At the time, this was obvious when the bombings of homes and churches, the public burning of crosses and other forms of intimidation, and the ongoing shootings and disappearances of civil rights workers were considered. The whole nation watched as the Birmingham Public Safety Commission, when thousands of children stayed home from school to protest, turned fi re hoses on children, hoses powerful enough to break their bones and roll them down the street. Those images told millions why African Americans could no longer wait for jus-

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tice to arrive. Justice would never be delivered if it were to be delivered by Alabama’s public officials. The book was also speaking to white moderates, most eloquently in its fi fth chapter. There, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was reprinted. In it, King argued that moderation in the face of injustice is not an option: There can be no middle ground between good, sanctioned by God, and evil, epitomized by segregation. King argued that churches, schools, businesses, and other institutions must change radically for a desegregated future to be realized. Why We Can’t Wait was also addressed to black nationalists and others eager for social justice. King cautioned that the Civil Rights movement could not rest on its laurels. Victories were won in Montgomery, Little Rock, and Birmingham, but much more had yet to be accomplished: The civil rights bill had not yet been passed by Congress or signed by the president, and African Americans still could not vote in most of the South. Additionally, massive economic development was sorely needed for employment, housing, and the education and cultivation of a civil society. For various civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, CORE, and the Urban League, the book called for a united front against social inequity. King argued for forbearance and due diligence, the need to continue to press for the immediate redress of grievances. King called these groups to use all their professional and organizational talents even though many were weary of the fight. King’s book admonished them to persevere.

For Discussion or Writing 1. King was awarded the Nobel Prize in peace in the year after the publication of Why We Can’t Wait. Read the Novel Peace Prize Presentation Speech made to King, which can be found on the Internet at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_ prizes/peace/laureates/1964/press.html. Next, analyze how the Nobel committee’s reasons for awarding the prize can be supported in Why We Can’t Wait. Finally, write a well-developed essay that argues why King deserved the prize, supporting everything you say with quotes from

Why We Can’t Wait and from the Nobel Peace Prize Presentation Speech. 2. The day after the assassination of King in 1968, Why We Can’t Wait was reprinted and copies sold by the thousands. In a well-developed essay that relies on the details and arguments King proffers in his text, speculate why this work sold so many copies after his death.

Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967) This book was the last to be published during King’s lifetime. In it, King summarized the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement but was more interested in addressing his growing concerns regarding key developments of the late 1960s. King addressed the self-defensive, sometimes revolutionary use of violence advocated by “Black Power,” the social dichotomy of rich and poor living within the United States, and the growing similarities between capitalism and Soviet-style communism, and offered his vision of the day when we could all live in “the world house.” Just as in many of his other writings, King used his book to respond to the context of his immediate surroundings. He was fully aware of the difficult times in which he lived. Yet he sought to harmonize differences between him and other leaders and organizations. For example, King felt that the objectives of the nonviolent civil rights organizations and those adhering to the tenets of black nationalism were not in opposition to each other. They, instead, differed on means. The challenge, though, was resolving the tension between the rich and poor living in the United States. For King, the status of African Americans was an extreme example of the problems brought on by unfettered capitalism. He referred to the wealthy white suburbs surrounding inner cities of poverty and blight as metaphors for global conditions. The United States and Western Europe were surrounded by increasingly impoverished nations whose populations were unwilling to watch as the West grew more affluent.

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King argued that communism was flawed because it justified using any means available to achieve its utopian end of class equality. King criticized this because for him the ends could not be used to justify the means. Yet, capitalism did the same. He found that in the pursuit of maximizing profits capitalism was willing to justify any means available to it—at the time, even war. On this basis and for other reasons King opposed the war in Vietnam. He instead advocated what he called the “world house.” In the post–cold war 21st century King’s description of the world house looks remarkably like the “global community” of today. Unfortunately, many of King’s warnings were not heeded. The responses to this book were disappointing to King. Many ignored it as a vestige of days gone by from a leader who had failed to keep up with the times. Others saw it as wishful thinking. Even today, views of this book are limited to those who can fi nd a copy in the used book sections of dealers—Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? is out of print. Yet it speaks to a number of challenges faced by those living in the early 21st century. Racially disparate outcomes in education, discriminatory housing patterns in urban areas, poor health care, and ballooning imprisonment rates are all addressed through King’s prism. His use of history and the place of African Americans in it, his experiences dealing with presidential politics, and the values of his Christian ministry were all used to assess where the United States was headed and the consequences of present actions.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What does King mean by “Beloved Community”? How does this contrast with his description of the Black Power movement? 2. What does poverty mean to King? What do you think when he compares it to the violence of racism? 3. What criticisms would King have today about the following aspects of US foreign policy— the war in Iraq, the war against terrorism, the United States immigration policies toward Latin America, U.S. prisons?

4. While often contrasted, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X also converged on a number of issues. Looking for connections between King’s Where Do We Go from Here and Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet.” From your knowledge of these two thinkers or from researching an encyclopedia or reliable Web site, evaluate in what ways and areas the two converged during the last two years both were alive. As you make your assessment, think about whether their stances enabled them to bridge their disagreements.

“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (1969) Martin Luther King, Jr., gave this speech at the Bishop Charles Mason Temple Church of God in Christ on April 3, 1969. Memphis sanitation workers, mostly African American, were on strike, demanding that the city pay them the federal minimum wage. King’s speech at the rally reminded the workers that they were fighting for dignity, proclaiming the eventual success of unified, nonviolent action. Presciently, King assured them that their cause would succeed regardless of what happened to him. He was assassinated soon after. There are several significant features of this speech. Key among these is the context within which he gave it. The strike had been difficult: Rather than participate in good faith negotiations with the strikers, city officials had refused all talks. They declared the strike to be illegal and local courts agreed, issuing injunctions that prevented demonstrations. A previous march by the workers had been met with tear gas, and violence had erupted. For the fi rst time in King’s career, a peaceful demonstration he had organized developed into a riot that resulted in vandalizing and looting of businesses.. Protesters engaged in hand-to-hand fights with police. Another major element of the speech’s context was the ever-present harassment of King by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) led by J. Edgar Hoover. Few knew that the FBI had targeted King for years and that Hoover considered him “one of

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the most dangerous Negroes” in the United States. Congress did not even know about the FBI’s secret counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO. Its purpose was to monitor and disrupt the organizations and activities of groups identified by Hoover as “un-American.” Congressional hearings that followed King’s assassination revealed that Hoover had placed tremendous pressure on King to commit suicide. The FBI director used anonymous notes, scandalous rumors, and death threats designed to dispirit and discredit King as a leader. Many who were close to King recalled that he was suffering from severe depression and fatigue at the time of the speech. King was a master of the delivery style of southern black Baptist ministers. He did not just deliver a speech by reading prepared notes. On this night, he spoke without notes because he had not actually planned to attend the rally. It was not until his aides saw the packed church that they returned to the hotel and pleaded with him to go there and say a few words of encouragement. In the spirit and style of the black pulpit, King used a “call and response” delivery that was familiar to his audience. This style invited the strikers and their families to join in with words of encouragement as King reached his climatic conclusion. On several occasions, spontaneous applause interrupted his impromptu address. And that was to be expected and accepted as approval of the specific points being made. The imagery used by King took his listeners through history as he compared great events in the development of the West to what was happening in Memphis that night. He intertwined this with references to biblical scenes. By the end of the speech, it became apparent that King used the journey of Moses and the children of Israel as a simile for the journey he had made with the Civil Rights movement over the past 13 years. And like Moses looking down into the promised land from the summit of Mount Nebo he, too, must be satisfied with having successfully made the journey. He suggested that like Moses he was willing to die and not share freedom with his people. The audience

grew still as King concluded his remarks by saying that he had received threats from “some of our sick white brothers” but that “it doesn’t matter with me now.” At that moment the audience grew still as rain, thunder, and lightning seemed to emphasize his points. Despite the personal distress he was feeling, King offered an optimistic message. As a feature of most of his work, it must be remembered that he was extraordinarily hopeful, even in the face of overwhelming odds. The conclusion of this speech was no exception. He clearly believed that his people would be free and so his safety did not matter. “I’m not worried about anything! I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the coming of the Lord!”

For Discussion or Writing 1. King frequently used hymns and Negro spirituals in his speeches and sermons. Visit http:// www.negrospirituals.com/ and determine from what song the last phrase of this speech is taken. Why would it be familiar to his audience? After thinking through the song and its meaning, write a well-developed essay that argues why King deliberately chose this song to support his message and connect with the audience. 2. If the assassination attempt had failed, would this still be considered one of King’s most memorable speeches? Why? Why not? 3. King believed in progress. He used history to confi rm that events are connected and culminate in expressions of God’s will. Are there other views that might challenge these assumptions? 4. King spoke to an African-American audience at the Mason Temple. In 2009, a significant number of the sanitation workers and others living in society’s periphery may be Latino. In what ways would this event have been altered? 5. To understand King’s speech and see it in a cultural context, visit http://www.archives.gov/ education/lessons/memphis-v-mlk/activities. html, consulting the primary documents there and completing the “Documents Lesson Plan:

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Court Documents Related to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Memphis Sanitation Workers.”

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON KING AND HIS WORK 1. Why was King attracted to the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi? Research Gandhi’s life and philosophy at a trustworthy Web site such as http:// www.mkgandhi.org/index.htm and discuss how the two men’s approaches and beliefs were similar, and how they might have disagreed. 2. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. . . . When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” With King’s quote in mind, read JOSEPH H ELLER’s Catch-22, which, on one level, is a sardonic critique of materialism. Thinking through the ways Heller depicts extreme materialism and how it occurs, apply King’s idea to Heller’s text. In a well-developed essay, stake a claim about materialism in the United States and how it affects social inequality, quoting Heller and King to support everything you say. 3. Research the FBI fi les on Martin Luther King, Jr., which can be found at http://foia.fbi.gov/ foiaindex/king.htm. You will fi nd a full report on the King assassination. After learning what the report has to say, write a well-developed research paper that argues why King was killed and who was responsible. As you do the research, think about the significance of the FBI’s records, which until recently were not available to the public. From looking at the version marks and excisions on the pages, what conclusions can you draw about the role of the FBI in the civil rights era? 4. With the following passage from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham City Jail” in mind, contrast the way King here and Henry

David Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience” defi ne just and unjust laws: How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I- it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression ‘of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

With these defi nitions in mind, write a welldeveloped essay on the role of law in society according to Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr. 5. Using King’s criteria for distinguishing just from unjust laws, explain why the law requiring us to pay federal income tax is just or unjust. Do King’s criteria provide a clear basis for judging here? What does that tell us about them?

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WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Abernathy, Ralph David. And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: Ralph Abernathy, An Autobiography. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990. Albert, Peter J., and Ronald Hoffman, eds. We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: Pantheon Books in cooperation with the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1990. Bennett, Lerone, Jr. What Manner of Man: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Chicago: Johnson, 1976. Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. ———. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. ———. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65. New York: Schuster, 1998. Carson, Clayborne, and Kris Shepard, eds. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Warner Books, 2000. Carson, Clayborne, et al. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Cone, James H. Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991. Dyson, Michael Eric. I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Touchstone, 2000. Garrow, David. The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. Hansen, Drew. The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Jackson, Thomas F. From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

King, Dexter Scott (with Ralph Wiley). Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir. New York: Intellectual Properties Management in association with Warner Books, 2003. Lewis, David Levering. King: A Critical Biography. New York: Praeger, 1970. Lincoln, C. Eric, ed. Martin Luther King, Jr.: A Profile. New York: Hill & Wang, 1970. “Martin Luther King, Jr. F.B.I. Files.” Federal Bureau of Investigation. Available online. URL: http://foia. fbi.gov/foiaindex/malcolmx.htm. Accessed May 21, 2007. “Martin Luther King Online.” MLK Online. Available online. URL: http://www.mlkonline.net/. Accessed on May 21, 2007. “Martin Luther King: The Nobel Peace Prize 1964.” Nobelprize.org. Available online. URL: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/ laureates/1964/index.html. Accessed May 21, 2007. Oates, Stephens. Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Mentor Books, 1982. Pepper, William F. An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King. New York: Verso, 2003. “The King Center.” Available online. URL: http:// www.thekingcenter.org/index.asp. Accessed March 25, 2009. “The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute.” The Martin Later King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Available online. URL: http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/. Accessed May 27, 2007. Walton, Hanes, Jr. The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1971. Washington, James M. A Testament of Hope: Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991.

Dwight B. Mullen

John Knowles (1926–2001) It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart. (A Separate Peace)

T

he American author John Knowles was born in 1926 in Fairmont, West Virginia. Both Knowles’s father—who worked in the coal industry—and his mother were originally from Massachusetts. According to Knowles, his parents felt that the preparatory schools of the Northeast were the only institutions offering a genuinely broad education. Thus, Knowles’s brother enrolled at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, attending Dartmouth College afterward in New Hampshire. Knowles was also expected to continue this tradition and head to Mercersburg but found an academic prospectus for Phillips Exeter Academy with an accompanying application form and, in his own words, “just for the hell of it, fi lled it out and mailed it.” Consequently, at the age of 15, he enrolled as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, a well-known boarding school in New Hampshire. This academy bears a striking resemblance to Devon, the fictional school that features in his critically acclaimed work, A Separate Peace. In 1945, John Knowles graduated from Exeter but chose to defer his entry to college, preferring instead to enlist and join the war effort as a member of the U.S. Army Air Corps’ Aviation Cadet Program. He duly enrolled as a student at Yale University after spending several months with the aviation cadets and obtained his bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1949 from Yale. For some time after his graduation, Knowles moved to and traveled within Europe, working in the

field of journalism until the middle of the 1950s. This experience led him to compile something of an early oeuvre consisting of freelance articles and short stories. In 1957, John Knowles returned to the United States from Europe and landed a position as an associate editor at Holiday magazine. After encouragement from the playwright Thornton Wilder, who expressed keen interest in Knowles’s writing, he then began work toward his first published text, A Separate Peace. Indeed Thornton Wilder was significant in his encouraging Knowles to write about compelling experiences from his past. After his novel gained success and status with the American reading community, Knowles found himself in a position to resign from his employment with Holiday and devote himself to writing full time. A Separate Peace is based largely upon Knowles’s experiences at Exeter during summer 1943. Despite the resemblance of the Devon School to Phillips Exeter, readers are urged not to consider the plot autobiographical, although Knowles himself confirmed that a considerable amount of the elements in the novel derive from his own personal experiences in this place and at this time. In his memoir entitled Palimpsest, Gore Vidal reveals that he and John Knowles attended Phillips Exeter together, with Vidal being two years older. Gore Vidal also makes it clear that Knowles informed him that Brinker, a central character, is modeled on Vidal himself. “We have been friends for many years now,” Vidal said, “and I

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admire the novel that he based on our school days, A Separate Peace.” In addition to A Separate Peace, John Knowles published eight other books; he also wrote a travel book and published a collection of short stories. Knowles’s other major works are Morning in Antibes (1962), Double Vision: American Thoughts Abroad (1964), Indian Summer (1964), The Paragon (1971), and Peace Breaks Out (1981). Despite his early success, none of the later works was as well received as A Separate Peace. In 1960, John Knowles won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for a notable first novel and the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In addition to these honors, Knowles was rewarded with appointments as writer in residence at both Princeton University and the University of North Carolina. Toward the end of his life and in his later years, Knowles lectured at various academic institutions throughout the United States. Knowles’s major success was his fi rst novel, and none of his other novels achieved the status that A Separate Peace has enjoyed; however, as in his fi rst work, his main themes are greed, competitiveness, and corruption in the lives of wealthy American characters. In an interview, Knowles revealed that his time at Exeter was formative to both his writing and his personal life; the experience took him from the hills of West Virginia, forced him to learn the craft and practice of study and academic scholarship, moved him into Yale, and inspired him to write A Separate Peace, which ensured him a lifetime of fame and fi nancial security. He recalled from Exeter “a lively, congenial group of students in Peabody Hall that summer, many of them from other schools, accelerating like me.” One such student was David Hackett, who hailed from Milton Academy; he provided the model for Knowles’s protagonist Phineas in A Separate Peace. During his fi rst summer Knowles realized he had “fallen in love with Exeter.” He attributed much of this love to the two consecutive summers he spent at Exeter, in 1943 and 1944. He spent virtually all of his time at Exeter from September 1942 through August 1944, when he graduated. It was, in his own words, “total Exeter immersion.”

Knowles maintained that Exeter “really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation. The only elements in A Separate Peace which were not in that summer were anger, envy, violence, and hatred. There was only friendship, athleticism, and loyalty.” Knowles recalled that after returning to Exeter for the fall term of 1943, he discovered that the motivated, passionate, and driven time that he had experienced on entering the school had dissipated. By this time, virtually all the young, enthusiastic masters slowly left and moved away, one by one, leaving the more senior staff to teach: “Too old to be in any way companions to us, they forced the class of 1943 to be reliant very much on itself, isolated.” For Knowles, one of his most influential academic mentors was a Latin teacher named Mr. Galbraith, who taught him the intricacies of language, crucially influencing his thinking and his manner of expression. Accordingly, Knowles stated, “I am the writer I am because of him.” He maintained that the best teaching he received was at Exeter. After moving to Yale soon after his graduation from Exeter, Knowles swiftly became disillusioned with the nature of the academic system, claiming that the style of teaching he endured at Yale was “a distinct let-down.” He found that the academics either read out their recycled lectures en masse in large auditoriums, or, when meeting students in small tutorials, had an unwelcome preoccupation with their careers away from undergraduates. The academics seemed to be there for their own self-development, as opposed to the benefit of the students. For Knowles, Exeter taught him how to approach fresh and different material, organize his ideas, and express what he knew, felt, and experienced. This fascination with transforming his lived experience into both fiction and travel writing is indicative of Knowles’s works. Running throughout his corpus is the theme of our inherently irrational nature, which Knowles juxtaposes with the social order. Often relying on global conflicts, such as World War II or the Algerian war of the late 1950s, Knowles places his protagonists in existential crises during which they must defi ne themselves in the midst of cataclysmic events. In the present age

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of cultural diversity and an increasing awareness of class differences, Knowles’s novels feel antiquated, enshrouding a white world of privilege. Yet as he creates characters who come to terms with human suffering, especially the sort of suffering we all know in that difficult rite of passage that we refer to as adolescence, his works have universal appeal. There is little doubt he will continue to be known for his fi rst novel, the story of a war veteran who reflects upon his life and, in returning to the school where he began to understand himself and from which he left to confront the world, fi nds a strange mix of emotions: pride in his achievements, nostalgia for a lost era, and guilt over the losses he has known.

A Separate Peace (1959) A Separate Peace, whose title is taken from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, centers around the complex relationship between two students at the Devon School in New Hampshire: Gene and Phineas, who is referred to as “Finny” during much of the narrative. The novel is set in a New England boarding school very much like the famed Phillips Exeter Academy (http://www.exeter.edu/), an elitist institution that has long served as a feeder school for Ivy League colleges. Significantly, Exeter’s motto, at the time of the novel’s composition and at the time Knowles attended, was Huc venite, pueri, ut viri sitis, “Come hither boys so that ye may become men.” Of course, in light of the novel, which is a comingof-age story depicting teenagers who will soon be drafted into the Second World War, such a motto resounds with irony, for it is this movement from innocence into the horrific experience of battle that the novel depicts. Narrated by Gene after his return as an adult to the school, Gene observes that it has taken on the qualities of a memorial or museum, lacking any sense of personal engagement or feeling. Yet this in itself intensifies Gene’s recollection of the experiences he encountered there. As Gene moves over the playing fields, he observes the dominant feature of both the narrative and the landscape: a large tree overlooking a river. This is the site of the dynamic upon which the

narrative rests; at this point Gene begins to recollect 15 years prior, the time when he and Phineas successfully scaled the tree and jumped from it into the river. This challenge is normally reserved for the academy’s senior scholars, but Phineas persuades Gene to attempt it, much to the admiration and envy of his peers. This scene establishes Gene as a conservative who does not allow for breaking rules and Phineas as a provocative catalyst, one who incites others to act contrary to their usual instincts. Of course, Gene relates all the novel’s description from an adult perspective; the novel relies heavily upon the constant dialogue between the historical and the present, and the striking contrasts between a mature man and his adolescent self. In describing his former experiences at Exeter, Gene recounts his experiences as if they occurred, not in the past, but in the present, forcing the reader to realize all Gene’s recollections are informed by his present state of mind and subject to the accuracy of his memory. Gene’s language in this opening section emphasizes the rigid, strict, and regimented order of the Devon School and its students who are expected to succeed within its traditional, rigorous, and sports-oriented education. That Gene observes this in the present highlights the school’s adherence to its staunch conservatism and Puritanism after the boys’ departure. Emphasizing the importance of the tree in the chronology of events and the evolution of Gene’s feelings about the past, the narrator describes the tree in military language: “It had loomed in my memory as a huge lone spike dominating the riverbank, forbidding as an artillery piece, high as a beanstalk.” With this language the tree takes on the qualities of an immense, severe mass, yet when Gene finally observes the tree, it has changed dramatically: “absolutely smaller, shrunken with age.” The tree’s change in shape emphasizes the way emotional and historical factors skew one’s memory and makes evident a dominant theme in the novel: memory and its relationship with reality. As a consequence of their brief transgression of the rules, Gene and Phineas are prohibited from attending a formal academy event that evening. Mr. Prud’homme, one of the more senior masters, notes the boys’ absence and confronts them about it. After

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he inquires, Phineas concocts a ludicrous excuse yet does so with such panache that the normally stern scholar spares them punishment. This act, repeated later in the chapter after a more outlandish prank, brings about more potential confl ict between the students and the authorities. In terms of his character, Phineas is an anomaly and a rogue when compared with other students in the Devon School; his academic and sporting prowess is impressive, yet his nonconformity to expectations contrasts directly with his unerring knack of being able to flout the rules and escape without penalty. Similarly, Gene recalls that he is also treated less severely because he is not old enough to be considered for the draft and thus adopts a childlike innocence and ignorance of the escalating war, which exists outside the cloistered and enclosed walls of Devon. After their escape without censure, the pair devise another opportunity to jump. This time the two form a group called “The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session,” whose entire ethos is devoted to carrying out activities characterized by their danger and bravura. The initiation ritual for this society is straightforward: Jump from the tree. As Phineas and Gene attempt their initiation jump, Gene loses his balance before Phineas intervenes and prevents his fall, effectively saving Gene’s life. Importantly, after thanking Phineas for his actions, Gene later accuses him of deliberately creating the situation as an act that would simultaneously place Gene in danger and allow Phineas to engage in more self-aggrandizement and self promotion by acting as the hero. This sequence of events demonstrates important aspects of the text in terms of the atmosphere Knowles cultivates and his portrayal of the fickle relationships that are formed at the height of adolescence. As the “The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session” progresses and Phineas revels in both his power and his reputation among peers, an element of competition and jealousy begins to foment between him and Gene, who feels that his part of the friendship is both forced and verging on obligation, describing it as a “straitjacket.” Further examples of this simmering row include mutual accusations after the normally scholarly Gene performs poorly on a test and Phineas breaks the school swimming record

during an unofficial swim but refuses to go for the record under formal conditions. During this series of antagonisms, the differences between Phineas and Gene become more evident, with Phineas seemingly a wrongly accused victim and Gene a vindictive, envious villain seeking a scapegoat for his suspicion and inferiority. This conflict and friction between the two are important as they foreshadow a future encounter that will force these problems to the surface. When the clash occurs, it reveals a malevolent and vicious part of Gene’s personality. As Phineas and Gene climb the tree to jump once more, they mirror the earlier climb when Phineas saved Gene’s life. In this instance, Gene shakes the limb; Phineas falls from the tree and shatters his leg. Whether Gene intended to cause Phineas to fall is never clear. This deliberate ambiguity opens a space for the reader to interpret the actions, but the event weighs heavily on Gene’s conscience. The importance of this point in the narrative is highlighted by Knowles’s lengthy and extensive psychological examination of his protagonist: first Gene’s denial of complicity and culpability, then his paranoia regarding the revealing of the truth by his peers, and finally his dressing in Phineas’s clothes. In reference to his final act, Gene declares he “would never stumble through the confusions of [his] own character again,” yet it is clear the delusions he suffers indicate a crisis of identity. Phineas does not return to Devon for the start of the new term, leaving Gene to occupy their double room. As Gene progresses through the opening of the term, it becomes apparent that the relaxing of the standards during the summer has precipitated problems among the students; hence the masters (teachers) now exact a greater degree of severity with recalcitrant students. In an atmosphere of greater tension and suspicion, Brinker Hadley visits Gene and immediately accuses him of deliberately causing Phineas’s accident to obtain his room. Gene reacts with a series of fervent protestations and, because Brinker’s comments torment his already guilty conscience, he attempts to distract Brinker by suggesting they go and smoke in the Butt Room in the lower reaches of the building. When they are both ensconced, Brinker openly declares Gene’s guilt in

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front of his peers, creating a mock trial. His peers participate with a direct line of questioning about his “crime,” and Gene maintains the conceit, hiding the genuine guilt by responding with sarcastic remarks. His successful refutation of the accusations leads him to think that the suspicions dogging him have dissipated, but he remains disturbed by the incident. By this point in the narrative, the war has escalated and impinges upon the students’ lives; with patriotic fervor, their peers and relatives enlist to go to war. This in itself causes further intergenerational conflict, with staff and students’ clashing about questions of duty. Gene sees his fellow student, Leper, leave the academy and enter the service, while his own decision is prolonged by Phineas’s return to Exeter. The narrative and plot accelerate toward their conclusion as the war’s influence and eventual end near. Chronologically, time moves swiftly, and Gene enters the armed service after his graduation. But his training proves to be in vain as the war fi nishes and he fails to see active service. After his discharge, Gene visits Leper at his home in Vermont. Leper has been discharged from the service for health reasons, and this seems to have resulted in the deterioration of his mental faculties. Leper levels the same accusation at Gene as Brinker, namely, citing his involvement in Phineas’s injury, to which Gene reacts violently and attacks Leper before swiftly apologizing. Symbolically, Leper represents the war’s effects on the young generation, the corruption of innocence through harsh reality. Yet despite using such a damning symbol for the effects of war, Knowles then provides Leper with a moment of acute analysis and perception as he refers to Gene: “You always were a savage underneath,” he tells Gene, “a swell guy, except when the chips were down.” This in itself is as precise a commentary on Gene’s instability and unpredictability as can be found in the narrative, a foretelling of the final act in the text. After they return, Brinker confronts Gene once more, as though he has began to represent a symbol of youthful conscience. Gene again rejects this notion, and Brinker forces the culmination of this ongoing inquisition by dragging both Gene and Phineas into the “First Building,” to which Brinker has retained access. Brinker calls the ubiquitous Leper as

his witness, given that he was present when Phineas was injured. After Leper reveals that he saw Gene deliberately push Phineas, the convalescing victim rushes out of the room, freakishly falling on the steps outside and breaking his leg once more. After he is transported to a hospital, Phineas becomes agitated and emotional when Gene arrives to visit him. The doctor informs Gene that Phineas must undergo an operation, and Gene leaves, concerned about the reception he received. Upon his return, Gene is informed that Phineas died during surgery; the war claims a victim who was not even in the combat zone. Throughout this swift yet somber conclusion there is a dual sense of mourning and reconciliation, from Gene’s reaction after speaking with Phineas at the hospital to his recounting of their relationship as he walks around the notable spots where they spent their formative times. For Gene, the gym had “a significance much deeper and far more real than [he] had noticed before,” and the landscape has become “intensely meaningful.” Both seem as if they would tell him something “very pressing and entirely undecipherable.” In the wake of wars mental and physical, having found a peace within himself, Gene is now ready to listen.

For Discussion or Writing 1. As the title of the novel is derived from Hemingway, read A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s bitter remembrance of the atrocities of war. After reading the book, speculate why Knowles borrowed this title. Does the title convey something integral to the novel? Does it reveal anything about the novel’s protagonist? Weigh these issues as you formulate a response. 2. Both A Separate Peace and J. D SALINGER’s The Catcher in the Rye are concerned with alienated adolescence in postwar America. With this in mind, contrast the two works, evaluating how each deals with alienation within that cultural context. How do the two works intersect; how do they diverge from one another? 3. Critics have debated whether Phineas and Gene are homosexuals, or whether their relationship contains elements of homoerotic desire. While for some critics this way of interpreting the novel

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is fruitless, for others it is a profitable way of approaching fraternity, one of the novel’s many themes. What does the novel have to say about fraternity: the need for brotherhood, friendship, and camaraderie? 4. Discuss whether A Separate Peace could be considered an antiwar novel, with its emphasis on characters’ denial, trauma, and its ultimately tragic conclusion. 5. Both Gene and Phineas are flawed characters in their own way, be it through jealousy or egotism. Discuss the convergences and departures in their relationship throughout and whether the conclusion is “satisfactory.” 6. The speaker of Robert Frost’s poem “Birches” longs to recapture the innocence of youth. Throughout the poem the speaker contrasts the ideal with the real. Read “Birches” and compare Frost’s vision of lost youth with Knowles’s depiction of lost youth in A Separate Peace. What do these two works share? How could “Birches” be used as an introduction to Knowles’s novel?

Peace Breaks Out (1981) Published in 1981, Peace Breaks Out is John Knowles’s sequel to his earlier best-selling novel A Separate Peace. Set immediately after World War II, Peace Breaks Out transpires during the uneasy days after Germany’s and Japan’s surrender, taking readers back to Devon School, a microcosmic battleground of guilt and remorse. In a tale marked by warm nostalgia and adolescent poignancy, Knowles employs a distant, third-person narrator to explore a different dynamic than Gene and Phineas’s pupilpupil relationship. His protagonists, in this instance, are Wexford, a cunning and subtly unruly pupil who subverts authority to exercise his own, and Pete Hallam, a teacher of American history who begins to recognize the ideological tensions underlying a nation in transition. Peace Breaks Out begins in September 1945 with Hallam’s return from World War II Italy to teach at his alma mater. A former prisoner of war who suffered leg injuries from shrapnel, Hallam is accorded iconic

status by the majority of his pupils and the staff, who are currently living on the mythologies of returning war heroes. As he drives through the town of Devon, everything appears “smaller in size” than he remembered. Knowles returns to the narrative technique he used with such efficacy in A Separate Peace, in which Gene also visits a Devon unlike the one he once knew. The relationship between memory and reality preoccupies this section of the narrative: The emotional and physical experiences Hallam endured in World War II have ensured that “life itself was going to be smaller now, now that the great and terrible drama was over, all of the dead were buried.” As Hallam settles into Devon, he is accosted by his former Latin teacher, Roscoe Bannerman Latch, who invites him to attend a faculty social so that he may be introduced as a staff member and included in the community at Devon. Hallam notes that his former Latin teacher taught him what “the words ‘discipline’ and ‘precision’ and ‘ceaseless energy’ and ‘personal authority’ really meant.” This in itself highlights the emphasis placed upon such personal characteristics and relates further to the image of Devon as an academy whose graduates adhere to the wholesome, disciplined, and well-rounded mold that had shaped so many patriots for military service. Postwar conflict and ideological tension are clearly present as Pete presides over his first American history class. Initially posing the question “What is your view of American history?” Pete receives heated and antithetical answers from his pupils (15). Tensions within the group swiftly become apparent: The fervently patriotic Blackburn declares it “one long success story” but is contradicted by Hochschwender, a student of German descent, who responds with an overt and politicized paraphrasing of the ethos and principles of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (16). This, in turn, is opposed by a student of Irish descent, Wexford, who establishes the main dynamic of the narrative: the interrelationship between postwar politics and societal beliefs. This classroom argument becomes a debate about the true nature of democracy and freedom of speech in the press and media, which would appear to be Knowles’s greater debate articulated through the passionate rivalries of teenage students.

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The ongoing tensions and provocations between Hochschwender and Wexford take a range of forms, including the publication of inflammatory letters to and from the school newspaper, run by Wexford, and eventually the decision to erect a memorial window in honor of those from the Devon School who fought and died in World War II. The memorial is seen as a counterpoint to Hochschwender’s own assault on the traditions and values these students died for in the Second World War and ignites a series of recriminations and actions among the students who take “justice” into their own hands. After the commemoration of the memorial, tensions remain high between Wexford and Hochschwender, who continue writing polemical exchanges in the school newspaper. One morning it is revealed, however, that the memorial window has been smashed by persons unknown. Wexford, assuming Hochschwender to be the culprit, immediately assumes the role of chief inquisitor. A second suspect is Tug Blackburn, a member of the ski team who holds the keys to the chapel bearing the memorial window. After breaking his leg, Blackburn suffered from delusions before being hospitalized. Unable to recall whether or not he desecrated the memorial, Blackburn and Hochschwender are scapegoated. Despite his protestations and charges of conspiracy, Hochschwender remains under suspicion until a group of the sporting fraternity, the Pembroke Boys, fi nally take matters into their own hands. As Hochschwender rows alone on the lakes, nostalgically longing for the now-departed Adolf Hitler, he is confronted by classmates about the damage to the memorial. After distracting his friends, they fight with Hochschwender, who is repeatedly forced under water until he faints. The group panics when they are unable to revive the stricken student. Meanwhile, Hochschwender’s roommate is interrogated about his role in the act of vandalism. This interrogation concludes that Hochschwender, “top student Nazi or not, had nothing to do with the shattering of the Memorial Window” (149). Hochschwender ultimately dies of complications caused by a heart condition, and an official inquiry

ensues with accusations leveled against his assailants. Wexford rationalizes that they were vindicated in their actions because of the frustration and anger they felt about both missing World War II and the act of vandalism perpetrated against the memory of their much-envied predecessors. After the inquiry into Hochschwender’s death, Tug Blackburn implicates Wexford when he recalls that Wexford also had access to the chapel. Wexford denies ever possessing a key to the chapel. He proceeds to exploit Hochschwender’s death by collaborating with Dr. Wherry of Devon School to report it in the newspaper as an accident in which the suspects went to his aid too late. Wexford then sees an opportunity to expose the Pembroke Boys and divert attention from his wrongdoing by asking Mrs. Quimby, who was present at Hochschwender’s death, whether he said anything before dying. After she reveals that he said, “They drowned me,” Wexford feels confident that the Pembroke Boys will attract whatever punishment results. Hallam challenges Wexford as to whether the keys were returned to Tug Blackburn. Wexford responds that Blackburn received them before the memorial was broken, in direct contradiction to his assertion that he had never possessed the keys. It becomes evident that Wexford broke the window to implicate Hochschwender, but Wexford cannot be prosecuted because he holds the information about the Pembroke Boys’ assault against Hochschwender. In this conclusion, Hallam speaks for a generation tempered by war and weary of a future that simultaneously creates and dispenses with people like Wexford: He (Wexford) is an incipient monster. . . . For the last dozen years we’ve seen in the world how monsters can come to the top and just what horrors they can achieve. And those monsters were once adolescents. Here there seems to be one more of them forming, and in Vladivostok or the Belgian Congo or France there are perhaps others forming, and one of these days people will have to try to cope with them, confront them, risk everything in defeating them, defeating them once again, for a time.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. Among the main themes of Peace Breaks Out are disillusionment and adjustment in the postwar years. Think about the novel in light of other texts that deal with soldiers returning from confl ict, such as KURT VONNEGUT’s Slaughterhouse-Five or Tim O’Brien’s If I Should Die in a Combat Zone. With all three works in mind, write a well-developed essay on disillusionment in postwar America. 2. Does Peace Breaks Out offer a nostalgic or critical evaluation of postwar society? Write a welldeveloped essay in which you think particularly about the different opinions expressed about patriotism, freedom of speech, and the proposals placed in opposition to these opinions. What stance does the author assume; how do you know this? Be sure to cite the text to support everything you say. 3. Peace Breaks Out depicts the paranoia prevalent in postwar America, a time when the cold war, the McCarthy hearings, and the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg occupied the popular imagination. Compare Knowles’s treatment of this social mentality of suspicion and Arthur Miller’s depiction of it with The Crucible and E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. While all three writers address similar themes, they use different fictional strategies to induce us to reenvision contemporary America. Evaluate Knowles’s use of the prep-school environment, Miller’s use of Puritan-era witch hunts as an allegory for McCarthyism, and Doctorow’s approach to the Rosenberg case through historical fiction. Which is most effective? Write a well-developed essay that argues the strengths and weaknesses of these different approaches. To learn more about the events these authors are responding to, visit reliable Web sites such as http:// www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/ rosenb/ROSENB.HTM or http://www.senate. gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/ McCarthy_Transcripts.htm.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON KNOWLES AND HIS WORK 1. On one level, A Separate Peace deals with the loss of innocence and the movement into disillusionment, the painful process of understanding that most of us experience. William Blake, a famous romantic poet, formed an entire collection of poems around this theme: Songs of Innocence and Experience. Choose one poem from the “Songs of Innocence” and one from “Songs of Experience” (two excellent poems to contrast are “The Lamb” and “The Tyger”). Finally, write a well-developed essay comparing Blake’s vision of innocence and experience with Knowles’s vision in A Separate Peace. 2. In his introduction to John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, Harold Bloom argues: Unfortunately, Knowles could not resist the temptation of making Finny Christ-like, so that the tree from which he falls intimates the cross. The novel’s great virtue, its lightness of style, cannot sustain that heavy symbolism.

With Bloom’s thoughts in mind, write a welldeveloped essay on the Christ imagery in the novel, ultimately assessing whether this symbolism strengthens or weakens A Separate Peace. 3. Both Gene in A Separate Peace and Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness have confrontations with the darker aspects of their natures, aspects that are personified in Finny and Kurtz, respectively. Write a well-developed essay that explores how both authors use a character to represent and/or project this dark side of his respective protagonists. What does Phineas represent for Gene? Does Knowles, as Conrad does with Kurtz, associate Phineas with much larger human tendencies? Can the novel sustain such levels of abstraction? 4. Knowles is not the only author to use a group of struggling adolescents as an allegorical representation of society at large. William Golding

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does so in Lord of the Flies, another such novel, depicting a group of children stranded on an island who try and fail to govern themselves. Golding’s work is often seen as a powerful statement regarding the limits of human nature with regard to community. Taken together, what worldview is suggested in A Separate Peace, Peace Breaks Out, and Lord of the Flies? If all are taken as allegories for society at large, do they pose the same concerns? Write a well-developed essay that compares Golding’s allegory with those of Knowles. 5. Considering the success of A Separate Peace and its inclusion in many high school English curriculums, hypothesize why the novel has been often taught and whether it will continue to be taught. Have we reached a moment when the book seems dated, a “period piece,” or does the work have lasting value? To frame your response you might consider another adolescent literature classic, such as Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon or H ARPER L EE’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In your evaluation of three, consider what makes a “classic” work of literature. WORKS CITED

AND

ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Bloom, Harold, ed. John Knowles’s A Separate Peace. New York: Chelsea House, 2002. Bryant, Hallman Bell. A Separate Peace: The War Within. New York: Twayne, 1990. Carragher, Bernard. “There Really Was a Super Suicide Society,” New York Times, 8 October 1972, section 2, p. 2.

Ellis, James “A Separate Peace: The Fall from Innocence.” English Journal 53 (May 1964): 313–318. Gardner, John. “More Smog from the Dark, Satanic Mills.” Southern Review, 5 (Winter 1969): 224–244. Greiling, Franziska Lynne. “The Theme of Freedom in A Separate Peace.” English Journal 56 (December 1967): 1269–1272. Halio, Jay L. “John Knowles’s Short Novels.” Studies in Short Fiction 1 (Winter 1964): 107–112. Henkel, Wayne J. “Pas de Feux,” Washington Post Book World, 23 June 1974, p. 2. Karson, Jill. Readings on A Separate Peace. San Diego: Greenhaven, 1999. Knowles, John. “A Special Time, a Special School.” Available online. URL: http://www.exeter.edu/ libraries/4513_4621.aspx. Accessed March 25, 2009. MacDonald, James L. “The Novels of John Knowles.” Arizona Quarterly 23 (Winter 1967): 335–342. McGavran, James Holt. “Fear’s Echo and Unhinged Joy: Crossing Homosocial Boundaries” in A Separate Peace. Children’s Literature 30 (2002): 67–80. Slethaug, Gordon E. “The Play of the Double in A Separate Peace.” Canadian Review of American Studies 15(3) (Fall 1984): 259–270. Veitch, Colin R. “The Devon School Fiction of John Knowles.” Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature 3 (Spring 1986): 101–113. Weber, Ronald. “Narrative Method in A Separate Peace.” Studies in Short Fiction 3 (Fall 1965): 63–72.

Martyn J. Colebrook

Harper Lee (1926–

)

As you know, the South is still made up of thousands of tiny towns. There is a very definite social pattern in these towns that fascinates me. I think it is a rich social pattern. I would simply like to put down all I know about this because I believe that there is something universal in this little world, something decent to be said for it, and something to lament in its passing. In other words all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama. (Interview with Roy Newquist, March 1964)

N

elle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926, in a small Alabama town where she still lives today. Unlike most sleepy, southern towns, Monroeville welcomes thousands of visitors each year; millions of readers know it as Maycomb, Alabama—the hometown of the fictional Finch family in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Lee’s only novel has never been out of print and, since its publication, has sold millions of copies. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The novel, according to a 1989 survey, was one of the top five books taught in high schools across the nation (Applebee 27) and was named as second only to the Bible in making a difference in the lives of 5,000 respondents according to a 1991 Book-of-the-Month Club survey (Shields 1). Jean Louise Finch (“Scout”); her brother, Jem; their father, Atticus; Jem and Scout’s friend, Dill; and Tom Robinson, the falsely accused man Atticus defends—all are characters whose lives in Maycomb have fascinated readers for over 40 years. Lee was the youngest of Frances Finch and Amasa Coleman Lee’s four children. Her father, a financial adviser, lawyer, newspaper owner, state legislator, and successful businessman, moved to Monroeville in 1912 with his wife and first child, Alice. As a young lawyer, A. C. Lee inspired his novelist daughter, defending two African-American men, confronting the Ku Klux Klan as they marched in Monroeville, and expressing intolerance for bigotry, racism, and political corruption in frequent newspaper editori-

als. Unlike the mother in To Kill a Mockingbird, who dies when Scout is two, Frances Finch Lee lived until Harper Lee was 25. However, Mrs. Lee suffered from poor health, which her family called a nervous disorder, for years before her death. Because she experienced severe mood swings and eccentric, unpredictable behavior, the Lee family depended on Hattie Belle Clausell, an African-American woman, who cared and cooked for them. She appears in To Kill a Mockingbird as Calpurnia, the cook and caretaker. Mrs. Lee may have inspired Aunt Alexandra, whom Scout describes in To Kill a Mockingbird as “analogous to Mount Everest . . . cold and there.” Harper Lee, known always as Nelle (her maternal grandmother’s name spelled backward) to her friends and family, was a precocious, athletic girl who often aggravated her teachers with her impertinence. Lee’s best friend in Monroeville was a small, intelligent boy sent by his mother from Meridian, Mississippi, to Monroeville first in the summer of 1928, then by 1930 to live for several years with his relatives the Faulks, next-door neighbors to the Lees. Truman Persons, later adopted by a stepfather whose surname was Capote, remained Harper Lee’s close friend until near the end of his life. As children they played word games, read voraciously, wrote stories, and dramatized them. In a 1967 interview with Gloria Steinem, TRUMAN CAPOTE described Lee and himself as “apart people” (quoted in Shields 44). They were drawn to each other not only by their intelligence and creative

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imagination but also through their shared ambition to be writers. Characters in these early stories and later ones by Lee and Capote often drew on the eccentricities of their South Alabama Avenue neighbors. One Monroeville household proved to be an especially rich source of material. Mr. and Mrs. Boleware lived in a shabby, rundown house with their two daughters and one son, called Son, who as a teenager was imprisoned in his house, supposedly tied to his bed, as punishment by his father. Son was said to emerge occasionally at night as a peeping tom, but few ever saw him or heard his strange-sounding voice. Children were not allowed in the Bolewares’ yard even to retrieve the occasional ball hit from the nearby schoolyard. Though not as feared as the Bolewares, other neighbors on South Alabama Avenue provided character detail, sneaking bourbon into their iced tea, dipping tobacco, playing the fiddle, and loudly quarreling among themselves (Shields 52–53). Harper Lee explained in a 1964 interview that life in a small town “naturally produces more writers than, say, an environment like 82nd Street in New York. In small town life and in rural life you know your neighbors. Not only do you know everything about your neighbors, but you know everything about them from the time they came to the country” (quoted in Shields 51). Remembering these neighbors she knew so well would be invaluable for Harper Lee as she created her own small-town characters. While Lee describes growing up in Monroeville with little money and few luxuries, typical circumstances of Depression era children, she was the child of educated, upper-middle-class parents. Her mother was a graduate of the Alabama Girls’ Industrial School, where she studied Latin and English and excelled in music. Lee’s father taught for three years, served as a bookkeeper and financial manager for a law firm, and several years later became a lawyer and partner in the firm. He purchased the local paper in 1929; ran it with his oldest daughter, Alice; wrote editorials for it; and served in the Alabama State Legislature. Lee’s childhood was much more affluent than that of most children growing up in southern Alabama in the 1930s, particularly that of

the children of poor farmers and laborers, black and white. She was always able to attend school—her parents could have sent her to private school if they had so chosen. She also knew she would go to college, as had her older sisters and brother—a luxury that many children all over the nation, but especially in the South, would not have. Lee graduated from Monroe County High School in 1944 and enrolled that fall in Huntingdon College, a college for women in Montgomery, Alabama. Huntingdon required attendance at chapel every morning and enforced strict rules dictating their students’ dress code and behavior. An instructor seated with students during meals checked to see that students’ feet remained flat on the floor and all used the proper silverware while eating. Huntingdon College did not prove to be particularly suitable for the headstrong, nonconformist Nelle Harper Lee. Classmates remember her smoking a pipe, swearing freely, wearing no makeup, and preferring jeans or Bermuda shorts to skirts, cardigan sweaters, and pearls (Shields 72). In the spring of her first and only year at Huntingdon, Lee was one of seven students inducted into the national literary society, Chi Delta Phi, and had two pieces of fiction published in the college’s literary magazine—the beginning of her career as a published writer. In fall 1945, Lee transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. That September, World War II officially ended; once again there were men as well as women attending the university (women had far outnumbered men during the war years). As at Huntingdon, Harper Lee refused to conform to the expected mores of a young southern woman. She smoked openly, wore men’s pajamas, and sported jeans as she left campus to go golfing. She wrote for the campus humor magazine, the Rammer Jammer, later becoming its editor, and contributed pieces for the newspaper, Crimson White. Lee often expressed in her sometimes sarcastic, satirical articles liberal views on race, reflecting what she had learned at home. During her junior year (1946–47) Lee applied and was admitted to the University of Alabama School of Law. By 1948, having completed her second year of law school, Lee informed her

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father she was dissatisfied. Hoping to appease her, he agreed to send her to study in Oxford, England, for the summer. On her return, Lee attended one more semester before leaving during Christmas break without finishing her degree or taking her qualifying law exams. Though A. C. Lee longed for his youngest child to become a lawyer and join his law practice along with her older sister, Harper Lee was determined to be a writer. Her friend, Truman Capote, had already published his fi rst work, Other Voices, Other Rooms, in 1948. A character in Capote’s fi rst novel is a forceful young woman who envies the freedom of being a male; Isabel Thompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms resembles the young Harper Lee. Twelve years later, Harper Lee would use Truman Capote as a model for the character Dill in her novel. After she moved to New York City in 1949 to be a writer, Lee supported herself by working a number of uninspiring jobs, including reservations clerk with Eastern Airlines and British Overseas Airways. She wrote nights and weekends and traveled back and forth to Monroeville to see her family. One very difficult return to Monroeville was for the funeral of her mother in 1951. Tragically, six weeks later, Lee’s older brother, Edwin, died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 30. Soon after their deaths, Mr. Lee moved to a brick ranch-style house with his daughters. But Harper Lee returned to New York, determined to fulfi ll her dream of publishing fiction. By November 1956, Harper Lee had completed a series of stories. With help from friends she met with an agent, Maurice Crain, and his wife, Annie Laurie Williams. They encouraged her to develop one of her stories into a novel. That Christmas, Lee’s friends, Joy and Michael Brown, surprised her with a generous check that allowed her to quit her job and write full time for one year. Lee insisted their gift was to be a loan and eventually repaid them. In 1957, now writing full-time, Lee began a novel she entitled Go Set a Watchman, a title later changed to Atticus. She submitted her unsolicited manuscript to J. B. Lippincott, who gave her a several-thousand-dollar advance in October 1957 for the publishing rights. For the next year, Lee revised the novel with her Lippincott editor, Tay Hohoff. In 1958 after many revisions the

manuscript had a new title, To Kill a Mockingbird, and its author became known as Harper Lee, rather than Nelle Lee (she feared her name would be mispronounced as “Nellie”). Set during the 1930s, To Kill a Mockingbird, depicting oppression and exclusion in a closed southern community was published at a time when the United States was confronting the evils of racial discrimination. As with many authors, Harper Lee drew heavily on her own experiences in creating her coming-of-age novel. The Finch family of Maycomb—a family like the Lees of Monroeville, Alabama—differed from the predominant image of southern families in the first half of the 20th century, for the Lees and their fictional counterparts the Finches were liberal, well-educated, compassionate people aware of the suffering of others around them in the impoverished South of the 1930s. In November 1959, while awaiting the novel’s galleys, Harper Lee accepted Truman Capote’s invitation to accompany him to Kansas as his research assistant. Capote had read about a family of four being murdered in their rural home; the New Yorker agreed to publish Capote’s investigative article, which eventually became his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1965), an exemplar of what literary critics have dubbed “New Journalism.” Charles Shields in his biography of Lee argues that she was instrumental in helping Capote obtain interviews and recording details about the Clutter family (163–164), who were brutally murdered. The recent fi lm Capote (2005) depicts this period in Harper Lee’s life. Capote shows Lee, played by Catherine Keener, and Truman Capote, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, working together. According to Shields, Lee “was shocked” to receive no acknowledgment when In Cold Blood (1965) was published. Harper Lee’s only recognition was Capote’s brief dedication: “For Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee, with my love and gratitude” (Shields 253). Many wonder why Lee has not produced another novel. Though Harper Lee and her only novel have continued to receive awards and accolades for more than 40 years, the author has refused to be a public figure; no other fictional works by Harper

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Lee have ever appeared. While Lee has never been clear about why she has not published again, in a 1964 interview with Roy Newquist, she described how overwhelming the experience of becoming famous was: Well, I can’t say that it was one of surprise. It was one of sheer numbness. It was like being hit over the head and knocked cold. You see, I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird. I didn’t expect the book to sell in the first place. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of reviewers, but at the same time I sort of hoped that maybe someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected.

Nelle Harper Lee continues to live a private life with her older sister in the family home in Monroeville, Alabama, with occasional stays in her New York apartment. A celebrity who refuses to act like one, Lee has led a quiet, unpublicized life since the late 1960s. It is doubtful that Nelle Harper Lee, at 80 years old, will give up her private persona. Nevertheless, she will always be recognized as a best-selling author who told the story of three children and one black man from South Alabama and made their experiences universal ones. They, as we, grow up in a world that is unjust and learn that to understand others different from us we must walk in their shoes— the advice Atticus gives Scout: “First of all,” he said, “if you learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—” “Sir?” “—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Atticus’s lesson for Scout is still relevant more than 40 years later.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) To Kill a Mockingbird is composed of two plots told by two narrative voices, the adult Jean Louise Finch, a grown-up Scout remembering three years of her childhood, and the young Scout Finch when she is around six until she is nine. The opening story is of three children, Scout; her brother, Jem; and their friend, Dill, who try to ferret out their invisible, mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley. Imprisoned in his house by his mean father for years, Boo has become a Maycomb, Alabama, legend—a fear-inducing, nightstalking, shape-shifting bogeyman. The children are curious and fearful but determined to confront their strange neighbor. They suspect he is aware of them and is the secret giver of trinkets they fi nd in the hollow of a tree. There are encounters with other eccentric neighbors, a mad dog, a house that burns, shots fired in the night, and eventually Boo Radley himself. At the beginning of the ninth chapter, Boo Radley fades into the background as a second plot is introduced. Atticus Finch has been appointed to defend Tom Robinson, an African-American man falsely accused of rape by a poor white woman. The children watch as their father is targeted as a “nigger lover,” withstands an angry mob set on doing harm to Robinson, and is then defeated in his skillful courtroom defense of Robinson. The two stories converge at the end of the novel when Scout and her brother, Jem, are attacked because of their father’s courtroom tactics but are rescued by Boo Radley, who kills Mr. Ewell. This concluding incident is foreshadowed by the fi rst sentence of the novel: “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” Three hundred pages later readers know how fortunate Jem is to have only a broken arm. In the beginning, the adult narrator signals to readers that the she is remembering her childhood and the neardisastrous encounter that caused her brother always to have a shorter left arm. All is said to begin one summer several years earlier when Dill “came to us.” Scout is almost six and Jem nearly 10 when they first meet a short almost seven-year-old boy nicknamed Dill, from Mississippi. He has arrived in Maycomb, Alabama, in 1933 to stay with his aunts for the summer. By the novel’s end, the children are older and

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wiser, having learned of prejudice, injustice, tolerance, and understanding. They know what it is to be a mockingbird, a defenseless outsider, who deserves respect and understanding even if that outsider is an eccentric recluse, a poor child who cannot read, a farmer with no money, or an African-American man in Alabama in the 1930s. The novel concludes with a wiser, more-mature Scout remarking there is little else for Jem and her to learn except algebra. Harper Lee used her family, acquaintances, hometown, and childhood experiences in South Alabama to write To Kill a Mockingbird. Yet the novel is more than a thinly veiled remembrance of the past. Rather Lee shaped her content not only mindful of the 1930s but also clearly aware of the 1950s. As in much fiction, some of the historical details Lee incorporates are not factually accurate. Lee includes in chapter 3, set in 1933, a reference to the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which was created in 1935. She has Mrs. Merriwether scornful of Eleanor Roosevelt’s sitting with black people at the Southern Conference on Human Welfare in Birmingham in 1938, but Mrs. Merriwether’s remarks take place in 1935. Critics have noted that these and other real events, such as the complicated legal wrangling over the Scottsboro case and the impoverishment of much of the nation, particularly the South, in the years after the 1929 stock market crash, are important in understanding Harper Lee’s world. Though they may be reshaped to happen at another time, real events stored in a writer’s memory influence her imagination and thus her fiction. Scholars have frequently noted the similarities of the trial of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1931–37 trials of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young African-American men accused of raping two young white women on March 25, 1931 (see Johnson Student Casebook, 15–82). However, Charles Shields, author of a 2006 biography of Harper Lee, cites a letter written by Lee to Hazel Rowley, author of Richard Wright: The Life and Times. In this correspondence, Lee says she had another trial in mind. Rather than the ongoing drama of the Scottsboro case spanning two decades, Lee explains that she remembered a crime that occurred in Monroeville, reported on November 9, 1933, in the Monroe Jour-

nal, the local newspaper owned and edited by Lee’s father. Walter Lett was accused of raping a white woman, Naomi Lowery. Lett, an African-American man in his thirties, had already served time in prison. Lowery, a poor white woman in her twenties, claimed Lett had raped her near a brick factory south of Monroeville. Lett, tried in March 1934, was found guilty of the capital crime of rape and sentenced for execution that May. However, prominent citizens of Monroeville appealed his case, and after several stays of execution, the governor commuted his sentence from death to life imprisonment. Lett then suffered a mental breakdown while on death row and was committed to a mental institution, where he died of tuberculosis in 1937. Patrick Chura acknowledges the relevance of events that happened when To Kill a Mockingbird is set but argues that those happening as Harper Lee wrote the book are also influential: In other words, racial events and ideology of the 1950s/early civil rights era—the period concurrent with the novel’s production—leach into the depiction of Lee’s 1930 history, orienting large sections of the text not to the Depression era but to social conditions of the civil rights era. The mid 1950s/early civil rights era is therefore the context from which the novel is best understood as the intersection of cultural and literary ideology.

Chura’s premise is that discovering the historical and imaginative truth of the novel depends on knowing both the historical present of To Kill a Mockingbird and the time of its production. To the Scottsboro and Lett cases, Chura adds the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, brutally murdered by a Mississippi Delta mob on August 28, 1955. This shocking event and the trial in 1955 in which Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, accused of murdering Till, were acquitted made national headlines and coincided with the time when the adult Scout was considering her childhood. The narrator’s creator, Harper Lee, would have been most aware of the growing racial unrest of the nation, particularly in the South. All states were concerned with the

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May 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education striking down the legal fiction of decision of “separate but equal.” America was being forced to examine its political and social injustices, and race relations were under scrutiny as they had never been before. The real-life trials of the Scottsboro Boys and Walter Lett and the fictional trial of Tom Robinson are strikingly similar; they share juries who judged more on race than evidence. All took place in the Deep South in the 1930s, centered around interracial rape charges—black men and white women. The defendants pled not guilty but were found to be guilty by an all-white male jury on the basis of the accuser’s testimony rather than substantive evidence. The accusers were poor white women with questionable backgrounds; juries chose to believe the white women’s testimony despite contradictions in their accounts. Eight of the nine Scottsboro Boys were sentenced to death (only the 12-year-old was spared), as was Walter Lett and Robinson in the novel. In the Scottsboro case, two diligent attorneys continued to argue for their clients and eventually won parole, pardon, or freedom for eight of the nine. In the case of Lett, petitions from many leading citizens of Monroe County persuaded the governor of Alabama. Harper Lee’s father, A. C. Lee, may well have been one of these influential people standing up for the rights of a black man. Mr. Lee, as a young attorney in his twenties, had defended two black men accused of murder in his first criminal case. Lee lost the case, his clients were hanged, and their bodies mutilated after death. According to Charles Shields in Mockingbird, A. C. Lee never accepted another criminal case (121). Harper Lee, aware of her father’s haunting experience and of other trials involving black men and white women, was able to reshape her material into the unforgettable injustice of Tom Robinson and Mayella Ewell. Patrick Chura adds that the Emmett Till case and the fictional case of Tom Robinson also share striking details such as the suspected affront of a white woman by a black male; the all-white, all male juries; verdicts that upheld the white power structure; and the mutilation of the bodies. He also believes it is no coincidence that Till is killed on August 28 and that

Robinson is killed when “August was on the brink of September” (Lee 260). Tom Robinson’s trial in the novel and film has been the focus of a number of scholars interested in law and literature. Harper Lee herself suggested that justice was a major theme of the novel. In her 1966 letter to the Richmond News Leader after the Hanover County Board of Education banned her book from county schools, Lee wrote, “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners” (quoted in Shields 255). But what about codes, complicated and contradictory, that do not protect the mockingbirds of society, even when they have the counsel of honorable defenders? The paradox of how differently black people are treated than white people under the same set of laws is a difficult lesson for Scout and Jem to absorb. That they question this contradictory code is a valuable part of the narrative. Events before and during the trial allow Scout, Jem, and Dill to encounter other characters besides Calpurnia who are black. They attend Calpurnia’s church, sit with the minister during the trial, hear Tom Robinson’s reasons why he was submissive to a young white woman, and talk with Mr. Dolphus Raymond, the white man who has mixed-race children. These characters become real people for the children, not just subservient folks unworthy of their attention. The children also become very aware of what Claudia Durst Johnson calls “disjunctive legal codes: the codes people profess and those they choose to live by” (94). In her 1994 study of the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries, Johnson cites Atticus’s closing speech to the jury when he reminds them of the most important principle of America’s judicial system: All men are created equal. Atticus acknowledges inequalities in social status, wealth, and intelligence but thinks that such inequality should not exist in the courts of law. Yet the members of the jury, the people who live in Maycomb, and even the good church ladies who sympathize with the children of Africa do not live by this code. Rather, their behavior follows their belief in white supremacy, not equality.

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There are many other methods of analysis for To Kill a Mockingbird beyond the thematic approaches of justice and race. Maycomb’s social pattern that Harper Lee incorporates suggests a caste system— those with education and professional jobs, proud but poor farmers, white trash who are mean and racist, and blacks. It is impossible to miss the motif of birds and mockingbirds; readers learn, as do Scout and Jem, that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird. Other critics have explored the gothic elements of the novel, particularly in the Boo Radley sections. Superstition, elements of fear, hypocrisy, and education are recurring motifs interwoven in the two plots. Other studies analyze characters who cross boundaries delimiting gender, race, and social patterns. The children call their distinguished father by his first name. Calpunia chastises Scout for her poor manners, especially with the lunchless Walter Cunningham, who goes home from school to eat with the children. Scout’s character offers numerous examples of transcending boundaries; she does not act like the young southern lady Aunt Alexandria thinks she should be. When it was first published, some reviewers criticized the novel for the use of stock characters and sentimental tone, others criticized the use of two plots, while some found fault with the narrative voices and the two-plot structure. However, the critics Theodore and Grace-Ann Hovet, in their article “‘Fine Fancy Gentlemen’ and ‘Yappy Folk’: Contending Voices in To Kill a Mockingbird,” note that in recent years, Lee’s novel, always popular but not critically acclaimed, has received increasing critical respect. Scholars have praised it for its complexity, evocative use of place, skillfully drawn characters, and critique of racism and prejudice. The Hovets argue that through the contending, contradictory voices of a female child and the child as an adult, Lee demonstrates how a community may oppress and exclude individuals because of their race, gender, and class. The adult narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird tells about one small community because the story is an important one for all to hear. Dean Shakelford also praises Harper Lee’s use of the female voice in To Kill a Mockingbird. He argues that because of this critical female voice questioning tradition readers are able to see a parallel with the

South forced to question its reliance on racism and tradition. Scout refuses to grow up to be a southern lady; she rejects what has always been accepted. The South too had to refuse to be the Old South any longer and grow beyond its superficial gentility. Scholars such as Shakelford, the Hovets, Claudia Durst Johnson, and many others value Harper Lee’s skill in creating her one work of fiction. Their admiration converges with the popular acclaim of readers who have bought millions of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and the thousands of teachers who want their students to read and appreciate it. Forty years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, when asked by Richard Chalfin, owner of the Better Book Getter in New York, why she had never written another novel, replied, “I said what I had to say” (quoted in Shields 280). If a writer is to write only one novel, then saying what one had to say as Harper Lee did in To Kill a Mockingbird is a worthy goal.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Atticus is the wise father passing on an honorable code of conduct to his children. Describe three important values Atticus imparts to them. Which of Atticus’s adages or memorable quotes are associated with these lessons? (An example is the passage of walking in another’s skin quoted earlier). 2. According to Gary Richards, author of Lovers and Beloveds, “Maycomb is thus, for all its demands for gender conformity, an arena of dizzyingly varied gender performances” (137). In To Kill a Mockingbird who or what demands gender conformity? Who are the characters of Maycomb who defy these demands and cross gender boundaries? 3. On Christmas Day 1962 Universal Pictures released a movie based on the book starring Gregory Peck, who received an Academy Award for the role of Atticus Finch. The fi lm won multiple awards and is considered to be a classic, one of the fi nest screen adaptations of a literary work. After reading the novel and watching the fi lm, choose one segment of the novel and analyze how the fi lm depicts that segment. Note the dialogue of the characters and the details used in setting the scene. Do you agree with Thomas

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Mallon in the New Yorker (May 29, 2006) that “the 1962 movie version of the novel . . . is rather better than the original material”? Is the choice of “better than” accurate for the segment you have analyzed? Why or why not? Dean Shakelford, however, argues that the movie is less powerful than the novel, because the movie does not use the female voice as effectively. Is Shakelford’s criticism an accurate one for the segment you analyzed? 4. Read about mockingbirds. Why is the mockingbird an appropriate symbol for people who are outsiders in our society? Who are the outsiders in To Kill a Mockingbird? Cite instances in the novel where the motif of mockingbirds is woven into the text. How does this motif help connect the two plots? 5. Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy of plays (458 B.C.) dramatizes the evolution of law and a judicial system with ritualistic legal proceedings with trial by jury. With this in mind, contrast the legal ideal as it is portrayed in the Oresteia with the way the legal system operates in To Kill and Mockingbird. Finally, write a well-developed essay on the necessity and purpose of law in society, quoting both literary works to support what you say. 6. We as American citizens have the right to be tried in a court of law by a jury of our peers. Tom Robinson was not judged by peers. How might the outcome of the trial have been different if the jury had been more diverse, racially and by gender? When were women allowed on juries in your state? When were black men and women allowed to serve?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON LEE AND HER WORK 1. Research both the Scottsboro case and Emmett Till’s murder in an encyclopedia or a trustworthy Web site (for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities maintains an excellent site comparing Lee’s work to the Scottsboro case: http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan. asp?id=526). How do we reconcile such injus-

2.

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tices with our belief in a fair and equitable judicial code? Are you aware of such current injustices in our judicial system? When have you observed or heard of people professing one code of conduct but living by another? Read the novel Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. It was inspired by the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American youth kidnapped, beaten, and drowned by two white men because he whistled at a white woman. Then, write a well-developed essay that explores connections between the two novels. Have you seen others discriminated against because of gender, race, or social status? How does our legal system try to ensure equality in a court of law? Why is the code of fairness and objectivity more difficult when a person is on trial for a particularly heinous offense? Can you think of a recent trial or instance when fairness and equality were problematic? Who in our society can be thought of as a Boo Radley? Have you encountered someone very different from you whom you were repelled by but were able to accept despite those differences after getting to know him or her? JOHN UPDIKE in reviewing Peter Carey’s 2006 novel Theft: A Love Story (New Yorker, May 29, 2006) says that Carey left Australia and moved to New York “to gain the exile’s significant artistic advantage of enhancement through distance, isolating his homeland from the eroding clutter of ongoing experience.” Harper Lee made such a choice when she left Monroeville, Alabama, to live and work in New York. Who are other examples of writers who have moved away from a place and then successfully used that place as the setting for their fiction? Describe a childhood event from a fi rst-person point of view beginning with your current voice. Then switch to a child’s voice, the age you were when the event happened. Try to remember how you felt as a child as you experienced the event. Then conclude with your older narrative voice. How has the significance of the event changed as you have grown older? What is difficult about switching to a child’s

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voice? Finally, read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a work known for its distinctive voice. With these two novels in mind, write a well-developed essay on both the strengths and the limitations of writing novels from the perspective of youth. WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Abernathy, Jeff. To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Applebee, Arthur N. “Stability and Change in the HighSchool Canon.” English Journal 81, no. 5 (September 1992): 27–32. Bellafante, Ginia. “Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day.” New York Times Online edition. Available online. URL: http://nytimes.com/2006/01/30/ books/30lee.html. Accessed January 30, 2006. Bloom, Harold, ed. To Kill a Mockingbird: Modern Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Books, 1999. Capote. Directed by Bennett Miller. With Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins, Jr., Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood. Sony Pictures, 2005. Chura, Patrick. “Prolepsis and Anachronism: Emmett Till and the Historicity of To Kill a Mockingbird.” Southern Literary Journal 32, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 1–26. Flora, Joseph. “Harper Lee.” In Southern Writers: A New Biographical Dictionary, edited by Joseph M. Glora and Amber Vogel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. “Harper Lee Makes Rare Appearance.” BBC News. Available online. URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/ pr/fr/-/hi/entertainment/4572477.stm. Accessed May 5, 2005. Hovet, Theodore R., and Grace-Ann Hovet. “‘Fine Fancy Gentlemen’ and ‘Yappy Folk’: Contending

Voices in To Kill a Mockingbird.” Southern Quarterly 40 (Fall 2001): 67–78. Johnson, Claudia Durst. To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries. New York: Twayne, 1994. ———. To Kill a Mockingbird: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Lee, Harper. A Letter from Harper Lee. O The Oprah Magazine, July 2006, pp. 151–152. ———. To Kill a Mockingbird. 1960. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Mallon, Thomas. “Big Bird.” New Yorker, 29 May 2006, pp. 79–82. Maslin, Janet. “A Biography of Harper Lee, Author of To Kill a Mockingbird.” New York Times. Available online. URL: http//www.nytimes.com/2006/06/08/ books/08masl.html. Accessed June 8, 2006. Newquist, Roy. “Interview with Harper Lee.” In Counterpoint. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Remler, Nancy Lawson, and Hugh Lawson. “Situating Atticus in the Zone: A Lawyer and His Daughter Read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” In Literature and Law, edited by Michael Meyer. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004. Richards, Gary. Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Shakelford, Dean. “The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Film and Novel.” In To Kill a Mockingbird: Modern Critical Interpretations, edited by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. Shields, Charles J. Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. New York: Henry Holt, 2006. To Kill a Mockingbird. Screenplay by Horton Foote. Directed by Robert Mulligan. With Gregory Peck, Robert Duvall, and Mary Badham. Mulligan and Brentwood Productions, 1962.

Gwen McNeill Ashburn

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Life is continuously surprising one with its events and its people and you know, the unforeseeable is constantly occurring in life. So why not in poetry? (Interview with Kenneth John Atchity, 1979)

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orn in Ilford, Essex, England, Denise Levertov never understood the success that resulted from her living and writing in America. Rather, she arrived at the “American” idiom through a conscious effort to listen to and read distinctly American voices. In a 1965 interview with Walter Sutton, she expressed her awareness of that process: “I had to accustom my ears to American speech and my whole nervous system to the pace of American life before it really began to come through to me” (“A Conversation” 5). Despite living more than half her life in the United States, however, she never considered herself fully assimilated. Her varied background and heritage help explain some of the ambivalence she felt in regard to claiming a nationality, a home, or even a single cultural foundation. She was born on October 24, 1923, to a Welsh mother, Beatrice Spooner, who was the daughter of a tailor and preacher, and a Russian Jewish father, Paul Philip Levertoff, who converted to Christianity and later became an Anglican clergyman. Denise changed the spelling of her family name to avoid confusion with her sister, Olga, also a poet. Denise Levertov came to life under the care and influence of parents who held diverse and politically sensitive views of the world. Besides having non-English parents, Levertov did not share with other British children in the experience of an English education. Except for ballet lessons, Levertov was educated at home by her parents until she was

12, after which she mostly educated herself by reading many of the books the Levertoffs had in their substantial collection and by visiting museums. As she suggested in a 1979 interview with Kenneth John Atchity, “Perhaps you could say I am a child of the London streets, I am a child of the Victoria and Albert Museum, I am a child of my mother’s girlhood memories of Wales, I am a child of my father’s Hasidic tales, I am a child of the Christian upbringing that I had” (“A Conversation” 103). Indeed, all of those childhood influences affected her poetry. Although Levertov did not attend school as a child, her parents did expect their daughter eventually to attend university. World War II, however, led her to work through her twenties as a civilian nurse in London. After the war she took odd jobs in the city until she worked again as a nurse in Paris, France. Although the war interrupted her informal education and prevented a formal one, Levertov developed her artistic sensibilities during those years. Encouraged by her elder sister, Olga, she devoted considerable energy to dance, learned to paint, and, perhaps most significantly, wrote poetry. At the age of 12 she sent T. S. Eliot a sample of her poems. He responded with a letter of support in which he advised her to learn to read poetry in a second language, as she later did. At age 17 she published her fi rst poem, “Listening to Distant Guns,” in Poetry Quarterly, and at age 23 she published her first book of poetry, The Double Image.

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Her early “British” work received critical praise and was even anthologized in Kenneth Rexroth’s New British Poets (1948), yet the influential life experience for the development of her poetry did not occur until 1948: She left behind the English literary scene, which, as she described to William Packard, “was in the doldrums,” and moved with her husband, Mitch Goodman, to New York City. The move slowed her youthful productivity considerably as she adjusted to a new culture, learned a new style of speech, and raised her son, Nikolai. She did not publish her next book until 1956. She did, however, immerse herself in American letters as well as literary and political life. Besides participating in the Ban the Bomb movement of the 1950s, she quickly became friends with poets such as Robert Creely, Robert Duncan, and, significantly, William Carlos Williams, who, more than any other poet, became a mentor to Levertov. As she many times commented, Williams’s poetry gave her a way to cope with American speech patterns. His work invited her to look at poetry in a new light while affirming some of the already established poetic beliefs she held. She read Williams’s In the American Grain while traveling around Europe with her husband, supported by the American G.I. Bill. She immediately sensed the importance of the book and of Williams’s use of common idiom but did not know how, as she put it, to hear his poetry. After returning to the United States for an extended time and acquainting herself with American styles of speaking, she learned the cadences and rhythms of his voice. She later decided that the norm of poetic language must be the everyday use of language. As she explained in an interview with William Sutton, “It is a question of the individual’s idiom, of writing in your own language within your own or up to the limits of your own range of vocabulary, not in some preconceived literary language” (“A Conversation” 6). Her ideas on “natural” poetic language, stemming from Williams’s influence, related to another of her defining poetic beliefs, that of organic form. She cited both T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” and Williams’s dictum “no ideas but in things” as influential to her early writing practices. For Levertov this meant a discovery of structure through the

close observation of objects. She clarified her position in an interview with Reid, explaining, “Rather than breathing life into dust, though, I see it as perceiving the life inherent in the dust” (Reid 71). Thus, she wrote poetry under the assumption that objects have intrinsic form and that a poem’s language and its structure can arise from that objective essence. She borrowed Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term inscape to describe the inner core that is part of an object. She called a poem attentive to an object’s “inscape” organic because it does not impose its own structure but rather adopts the object’s characteristic structure. Her concern with organic form and natural idiom continued to inform her work, even as she and her critics began to discuss more frequently the abstract subject matter of her later poetry, which deals with the politics of war, feminism, and religion. After publishing several successful books of poetry in the United States and winning awards, critical recognition, popular praise, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Levertov began teaching. She took her first position in 1964 at the Young Men’s and Women’s Christian Association Poetry Center in New York City. That same year she became an honorary scholar at Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, and by 1965 she was teaching at City College of New York and at Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey. In the following years she taught at a number of different institutions for higher education, ranging from Tufts University in Massachusetts to the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her continuous output of critically acclaimed poetry, Levertov taught, enabling her to get to know students and participate in student life. The vibrant and active student population of the 1960s fed her social activism during a time of particularly heated political protest in America. In a discussion of the influence that teaching had on her writing, she explained to William Packard, “It’s had a profound effect on my life in bringing me into contact with the student generation, and with political activism on the various campuses. If I hadn’t been teaching I might easily have found myself very isolated politically, and perhaps would not have developed” (“Craft Interview” 37). Her political development led

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to increased involvement throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Among other forms of activism, she coinitiated the movement of Writers and Artists Protest against the war in Vietnam, traveled to Hanoi with fellow poet Muriel Rukeyser, and participated in an antidraft organization called RESIST, which eventually led to her husband’s arrest. Throughout her years of protest she continued to write; her poetry became increasingly fixated on political issues, especially the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Many critics point out that Levertov’s moralizing in the face of bloodshed was not new to her in the 1960s and 1970s. Even her first published poem observed, “That low pulsation in the east is war,” hinting at the stance of pacifism she later took (Selected Poems 1). The sound of distant guns, however, seems to have grown closer to Levertov and to her poetry. By 1967 the sense of “sad expectancy” found in her earlier poetry turned to disdain for explicit violence: “burned human flesh is smelling in Viet Nam as I write,” she declares in a poem called “Life at War” (Selected Poems 65). As Levertov publicly denounced political violence, her tendency to speak out against social failures led her writing away from the subject matter that made her famous— those mundane objects within which she found life. Naturally, not every one of her early supporters cared for her development as a protest poet. In contrast to her generally acclaimed early works, the poetry Levertov published after 1967 became the subject of divisive debate among friends, fans, and critics. Some considered the obviously left-leaning outcries against the Vietnam War preachy, overly sentimental, and even bombastic. One critic, Paul Breslin, wrote in an essay for Poetry magazine that “the moralist turned into a bully: I agreed with her horrified opposition to the war, but not with her frequent suggestion that poets are morally superior because they are poets, and therefore charged with lecturing the less sensitive on their failures of moral imagination” (163). Even her good friend and fellow poet Robert Duncan reacted to some of her particularly harsh war imagery by asking, “What is going on?” The comment led to a falling out between the two, who had been closely associated through their work and their friendship.

Levertov admitted that she sometimes published only “sort-of” poems. She cited one example in particular from her book Candles in Babylon, called “A Speech: For Antidraft Rally, D.C., March 22, 1980.” She was aware of the criticism she opened herself up to, saying in an interview with Penelope Moffet, “I’m sure it’s not going to help my reputation any. If any reviewer wants to criticize that book when it comes out, they’ve got an obvious place to begin—‘well, it’s not poetry, this ranting and roaring and speechmaking’” (Moffet 122). And although many critics did in fact level such criticism, Levertov never apologized for the strong political nature of her poems. She traced her social awareness to her upbringing and continued to insist that she would never use poetry itself to further a political agenda. Rather, as she said in an interview with Joan F. Hallisey, Levertov worked “through poetry, to stir others’ minds or to articulate what readers feel but have not found words for” (“Invocations of Humanity” 145). After divorcing her husband and during the post–Vietnam War period, Levertov turned toward religion. Although her parents had raised her in a spiritually rich household, it was not until the early 1980s that her work took on explicitly religious overtones. With poems such as “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus” and “‘In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being’” she drew Christianity into her work and recognized God as “the air enveloping the whole / globe of being” (Selected Poems 194). Rather than giving up on social activism to deal with exclusively spiritual matters, she joined religion and politics, as El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation, her 1983 libretto with music by W. Newell Hendricks, attests. Religion for Levertov did not mean having an unquestioning faith. It did, however, aid her in regaining perspective on the splendor of life while also continuing her humanistic project through poetry. As she explained to Lorrie Smith, “I now define myself as a Christian, but not a very orthodox one, and I think that there is a way of looking at Christian faith as involving the cooperation of man” (“An Interview” 141). Throughout her career, Levertov’s poetry developed according to her interests. Just as she insisted, however, there was no disconnection between her life and her writing

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nor between one period of her poetry and another. Estrangement from dominant social practices during the 1960s and 1970s did not interrupt her concern with organic form any more than her interest in Christianity estranged her from political awareness. When she died in Seattle, Washington, in 1997 of complications of lymphoma, she had melded European, British, American, Christian, and Jewish personal history and life experience. She admitted late in her life that her diction was often closer to British than American English and that her sentiments for the “mother land” never faded. Yet Levertov remained a hugely influential poet in the United States, known for her complex sense of rhythm, experiments in form, and precise language. It is exactly that sense of complexity in her life and her poetry, the fact that she was and is “many things and no one thing,” that established her as a prominent author and that continues to intrigue readers today (Sutton, “A Conversation” 4).

“Illustrious Ancestors” (1958) Published in 1958, “Illustrious Ancestors” appeared in Overland to the Islands, which critics often call Levertov’s second “American” collection. Her references to a distinctly non-American history, however, show us how she tempered her assimilation by including her ancestral past among her contemporary experiences. The poem begins with a name, “The Rav / of Northern White Russia,” and a nearly fantastic recollection of his youth: He declined “to learn the / language of birds” (Selected Poems 8). As the poem continues, we encounter a tailor, Angel Jones of Mold. On first reading, those references to unfamiliar names and fablelike biographies seem mystifying. Here it helps to know something of Levertov’s life. In an essay titled “The Sack Full of Wings” included in Tesserae, published more than 30 years after “Illustrious Ancestors,” she explains that “the Rav” is her father’s great-grandfather, Schneour Zalman, founder of the Habad branch of Hasidism (1). From other sources we learn that Angel Jones of Mold is part of her mother’s ancestry and was a

tailor, teacher, and preacher. Although the two men had similar interests and lived during the same period (the late 1700s and early 1800s), they were separated by culture, religious prejudice, and language. Levertov, then, becomes the link that joins their disparate lineages. Knowing that the two men, the “Illustrious Ancestors,” stem from Levertov’s family tree helps the reader understand her position as the poem’s fi rst-person narrator, the third character the reader encounters. In the fi nal section Levertov writes: “Well, I would like to make, / thinking some line still taut between me and them, / poems . . .” (9). We can read the poem as more than merely paying homage to well-respected family members. It also describes her aspirations as a poet. The last portion of the poem serves to clarify the seemingly inexplicable fi rst parts about learning the language of birds and sewing meditations into britches. In quick succession the reader learns the favorable traits Levertov wants to draw upon: directness, hardness, soundness, and mysteriousness. Interestingly, Kenneth Rexroth, one of Levertov’s earliest endorsers, praises her early poetry with the characterization “Nothing could be harder, more irreducible, than these poems” (Rexroth 14). And many critics have commented upon the careful attention to sound (such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, euphony, cacophony) in Levertov’s work. In that way, her poems do appropriate characteristics of her great-great-grandfather’s floor and bench. Knowledge of Levertov’s poetic sensibilities and personal history, however, does not render “Illustrious Ancestors” completely understandable, methodical, or interpretable. While the fi rst three nouns she admires—directness, hardness, soundness—suggest clarity, the last—mysteriousness—introduces a paradox. How can she write unambiguous poems that are, at the same time, mysterious? The poem’s fi nal image actually provides an example of the way Levertov does just that. To condition mysteriousness, last of the four nouns, we have a “silence” produced “when the tailor / would pause with his needle in the air” (8). The clarity of the description allows the reader to form

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a clear image of the tailor piercing the air with his most basic instrument. The tailor’s action, however, does not reveal a single or particular meaning within the context of the poem. Here, Levertov uses poetic imagery not only to describe mysteriousness but also to produce a sense of mystery. The close relationship between image and idea as well as content and form continued to concern Levertov and inform her poetry throughout her entire career.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In many of her interviews and essays, Denise Levertov discussed the important influence her family had on her creative work. “Illustrious Ancestors” is only one example in which specific references to her personal biography take on a significant role in her poetry. Consider some of her other poems, such as “Olga Poems,” “A SoulCake,” or “Wings in the Pedlar’s Pack,” and write an essay about the author’s life as it figures into her work. Must a reader be intimate with the facts of Levertov’s history to make sense of her poems? What are the assumptions an author makes when making such personal references? 2. As discussed, “Illustrious Ancestors” lists four nouns to which Levertov hoped her poetry might adhere. Choose any of her poems—use “Illustrious Ancestors” even—and discuss the ways in which she does or does not achieve the goal. 3. Consider the relationship in “Illustrious Ancestors” between the abstract and the tangible. When Levertov writes of praying with “the bench and the floor” or of putting meditations “into coats and britches,” what sort of creative leaps does she take? How do prayers and meditations relate to physical objects, and what does the connection imply about the poem as a whole?

“To the Snake” (1960) Appearing in her third book of “American” poetry, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, published in 1960, “To the Snake” provides us with a good example of Levertov’s objective poetry. Recall from the previous discussion of organic form that Lever-

tov believes objects are inherently ordered. Careful attention allows poets to discover an essential structure, which may not immediately present itself. With that artistic theory informing her writing, she carefully describes and elucidates particular objects she observes. “To the Snake” focuses on an experience with a green snake. The scene takes shape through the voice of a first-person narrator who encounters the snake while with friends. The speaker leaves much of the context for this meeting out of the poem and instead concentrates on the snake itself as an object of stimulation. As Levertov explains in her essay “Some Notes on Organic Form” from Poet in the World, poets see certain things that move them to speech. In this case, the visceral touch of a snake encourages the narrator to describe the snake’s “cold, pulsing throat,” “arrowy gold scales,” and the “whispering silver” of its “dryness” (Selected Poems 14). Here we see the deep pleasure that Levertov takes in nature and the experience of tangible things, both of which recur throughout her poetry. “To the Snake,” however, provides a look into the darker side of Levertov’s adoration of the concrete. While we may read the poem as nothing more than a charming description of a brief moment in nature, the sensual adjectives and strong emotional connotations resonate with deeper meanings and contradictions. In the last line Levertov describes the speaker as both “smiling and haunted” (14). The conjunction of the two suggests that part of the enjoyment of handling the snake is derived from the sense of danger. Many critics go so far as to read the poem as a metaphor for erotic pleasure. Such an understanding gives the snake symbolic importance as a typical phallic image or, alternately, as an allusion to the biblical story of Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Whether or not we wish to read the snake as symbolic, the poem still presents challenges to consider. Both the brevity of the moment and the fleeting pleasure that it provides fi nd expression in the structure of Levertov’s free verse poem. The term free verse describes poetry that does not organize its lines according to a regular metric pattern. True to her belief in intrinsic form, Levertov organizes “To the Snake” by indenting every second line.

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The indentations create a sense of slithering quickly down the page until the last coiled stanza, which describes the snake fading “into the pattern / of grass and shadows.” Although the snake leaves “a long wake of pleasure,” the speaker can hold on to it only momentarily (14). Speaker and reader alike are left to ponder the experience and re-create it in language as concrete as the event itself.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read several other descriptive poems by Levertov, such as “Pleasures” and “The Tulips,” and compare the imagery to that of “To the Snake.” Do they all draw from nature? Do they all include strong connotative meanings? What other similarities or differences do you detect? 2. Considering the symbolic possibilities of the snake, reevaluate the poem’s meaning(s). You may include a discussion of the common associations we make with snakes. Do those associations change as a result of the specification of a green snake? 3. Notice that the poem is written to the snake, addressing it as “you.” What effect does this have on our understanding of the relationship between the speaker and the snake? 4. The title presents an ambiguity. While “To the Snake” might mean for the snake, as in the poem is written to the snake, “To the Snake” might also suggest movement, as in, toward the snake. Consider the different possibilities implied by each.

“A Solitude” (1961) Published in The Jacob’s Ladder (1961) before the majority of her most outspoken political poems, “A Solitude,” as does much of her earlier poetry, deals with specificity and the speaker’s personal reflection on the fleeting moments of life. Through a simple narrative about a brief encounter on the subway with a blind man, “A Solitide” explores the way difference affects relationships. Many critics laud the poem for its tenderness, but the speaker exhibits profound ambivalence about her position in relation to the blind man. Rather than offering a simple

moral about assisting the disabled, Levertov raises questions about the way we universalize individual perceptions. The first two stanzas prevent readers from establishing a firm grounding within the poem’s narrative. They do not provide details about place, time, or character—all the things we expect from a story. Instead they present a narrator questioning her perception. She states simply, “I can stare at him” and immediately wonders about his ability to perceive her presence, asking, “Or does he know?” (Poems 1960–1967 70). The second stanza compounds the sense of doubt. The narrator raises the question of her own desire to stare, proclaiming first, “O, strange joy, / to gaze my fill at a stranger’s face.” The next line, however, negates her satisfaction: “No, my thirst is greater than before” (70). By refusing to provide a logical explanation for her actions, or even a fixed dynamic between the speaker and the blind man, Levertov leaves the reader to fi ll in the gaps. Her use of fragmentation adds to the challenge and further invites (or forces) the reader to participate in the process of constructing meaning(s) from the material given. Take, for example, the first sentence, “A blind man.” The incomplete thought says nothing of who this blind man is and offers no conclusive idea about his role as the subject of the poem. He simply exists. The final sentence, “He says, I am,” echoes the first in that it confirms existence without determining its meaning (72). This final line demonstrates the poem’s tendency toward visual suggestion. The use of boldface text highlights certain aspects of the poem. Presumably Levertov means to draw attention to those highlighted words. The reason why, however, remains open to interpretation. The poem’s visual organization does not help fi x meaning but sensitizes the reader to perceptual ambiguities. The pattern of three-line stanzas creates divisions in linear thoughts. And line breaks isolate particularly resonant phrases that take on new meaning when separated from grammatical contexts. For instance, “he is blind?” “Solitude,” and “I see him” all take on additional connotative meanings when considered as distinct statements. As we explore the possibilities that “A Solitude” presents, some formulations of meaning will seem

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more credible than others. Accounting for specific parts before comprehending the whole, however, agrees with Levertov’s notion that the formation of a community depends on individual development. Exploration of our own ambiguous perceptions and social positions allows for interaction across our differences without erasing them. As the speaker says about the blind man, “he continues / his thoughts alone. But his hand and mine / know one another” (72).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read “O Taste and See,” another well-known poem by Levertov, in which she uses boldface to highlight certain words. Compare the two poems, focusing on the use of the visual aspects of poetry. Do they employ the boldface text in similar ways? What other visual characteristics does each poem have? Using specific examples from the poems, discuss how the look of each adds or detracts from possible meanings. 2. Levertov openly confessed the influence Rainer Maria Rilke had on her writing, even using a poem of his as a starting point for one of her own. And as she did, he wrote on solitude. In a letter Rilke once purported that “a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude” (57). What do you think he means by “guardian” of solitude? Why might solitude be so important to him? And how does his comment illuminate Levertov’s poem? Feel free to incorporate Rilke’s writing into your discussion. 3. The speaker sets herself apart from the other passengers on the train by saying that they only glance at the blind man, that they are not “thirsty,” as she is. What point(s) is she trying to make? How does it affect the poem? Does the dissociation change the reader’s relationship to the speaker?

“September 1961” (1961) “September 1961” appears in O Taste and See (1964), Levertov’s fifth collection of poetry written and published in America. Upon moving to the United States, Levertov quickly became acquainted—through read-

ing and in person—with American poets of her own and previous generations. By the time she published this poem she was already an established poet among her contemporaries and considered fully mature in her style. Unlike some young writers working to distinguish themselves in a competitive literary market, however, Levertov never shied away from discussing the poets who had a marked influence on her work. “September 1961” names three important American authors to dramatize her relationship with an earlier generation of poets and hint at the anxiety caused by their influence. Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) are among America’s most widely read modernist poets, all of whom suffered in their later years from the debilitating effects of age and mental deterioration. Interestingly, both Pound and H. D. spent the majority of their adult lives in Europe as expatriates, much as Levertov was a European expatriate living in the United States. Williams, though, became the most important to Levertov’s life and work. She spoke in several interviews of visiting him at his home in New Jersey during the later years of his life, after he had suffered several strokes and when he did not have complete control over his voice. He was alive when she wrote the poem, although he died in March 1963, before she published O Taste and See. H. D.’s death, the fi rst of the three, inspired the title “September 1961.” While some critics consider the poem to be no more than a timely tribute to three of her favorite poets, Levertov uses a complex (if well-trodden) symbol to express her anxiety over a generational shift in the landscape of American authorship. She starts by saying that 1961 “is the year the old ones, / the old great ones / leave us alone on the road” (Selected Poems 34). The road, which “leads to the sea,” acts as a symbol that, unlike a metaphor, cannot be reduced to a one-to-one correlation between itself and the thing it symbolizes. By using symbolism, Levertov leaves the meaning open to speculation, allowing the reader to make any number of connections. A cliché comes to mind: “the road of life.” However, by mentioning “the words in our pockets,” “the language into our hands,” Levertov expands the symbol to

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incorporate one of her primary poetic concerns, the process of writing poetry (34–35). As she said frequently, these “old great ones” gave her a language with which to think, write, and express. Williams in particular helped Levertov define her voice as a poet by exhibiting the clarity and richness of idiomatic speech. Her anxiety can be felt as a preoccupation with having to write after such enabling influences have fallen silent. She also worries, though, about succeeding them and becoming an old great one herself. Knowing that the new generation of poets cannot simply repeat their predecessors, she writes, “One can’t reach / the sea on this endless / road to the sea unless / one turns aside at the end” (35). New paths must be forged through the “deep woods.” And yet, arriving at the sea also becomes laden with the weight of double meaning. While it implies that one has achieved a certain status, it also means facing a fate of silence, as do the three poets ahead of her. The poem ends with an ellipsis, omitting finality and acknowledging the still unfurling road ahead.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “September 1961” employs the first-person plural we in speaking of a generation of poets. Whose voice does the poem represent? Why would Levertov choose to speak for a plurality rather than for herself only? 2. A tension exists in “September 1961” between nature and modern civilization. “Urban lighthaze” confuses and trucks dazzle while an owl “silently glides.” Explore the tension in a discussion about its relation to the rest of the poem’s meanings. Look at work by any of the three poets mentioned. How do they treat nature and modern civilization in their work? Do you think Levertov shares attitudes with any of them? Be specific in citing examples. 3. As did Levertov, Donald Barthelme frequently discussed the writers who had influenced his work. He often referred to his predecessors as “dead fathers” and considered it necessary to read a substantial number of them before being able to write anything worthwhile. Read his novel The Dead Father and compare his anxiety over influ-

ence and generationality to Levertov’s. Do not limit your investigation to “September 1961.” Consider any of her writing that may be pertinent, including her letters to William Carlos Williams, essays, and even interviews.

“The Jacob’s Ladder” (1961) “The Jacob’s Ladder” serves as the title poem to a collection published in 1961 that also includes a poem Levertov considered to be her fi rst obviously political poem, “During the Eichmann Trial: ‘When We Look Up.’” “The Jacob’s Ladder” takes its title and subject from a biblical passage. Once again, we see that Levertov establishes her major poetic themes even before exploring them more thoroughly many years later. Furthermore, “The Jacob’s Ladder” incorporates her interest in the poetic as a topic of poetry as well as elements from her Hasidic heritage. Background on the title’s religious allusion helps in understanding the basic content of the poem. The epigraph of her collection The Jacob’s Ladder explains not only the origin of the reference, but also Levertov’s interest in it. She quotes a portion of Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim: Rabbi Moshe (of Kobryn) taught: It is written: “And he dreamed and behold a ladder set up on earth.” The “he” is every man. Every man must know: I am clay, I am one of the countless shards of clay, but “the top of it reached to heaven”—my soul reaches to heaven; “and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it”—even the ascent and descent of the angels depend on my deeds. (Poems 1960–1967 2)

The quoted portions are from the Bible story in Genesis of Jacob’s falling asleep and dreaming of a ladder that reaches to heaven. When he wakes up, God, standing at the top, promises him the land he slept on so that his “offspring shall be like the dust of the earth” and spread in all directions (28:14). Levertov, however, claims that her interest in the story has more to do with the Hasidic interpretation.

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As the rabbi says, much depends on the deeds of every man, just as the angels’ ascent and descent depend on the dreams of Jacob. Levertov, as a poet, feels a responsibility to use her voice to stir people’s minds and articulate feelings for which others may not have words. While such a belief later leads her to activism, in “The Jacob’s Ladder” it leads to the romantic idea of transcendence. Levertov’s earliest critics grouped her among England’s “new romantics” because she often depicts art as exceeding the limits of the physical world, as well as locating a spiritual element in the earthly. Notice that in “The Jacob’s Ladder” the stairway is not “for angels’ feet that only glance in their tread, and need not / touch the stone” (25). Rather, it is built of sharp-angled stone that men scrape their knees on while trying to climb. Levertov uses the ladder as an image to express the difficultly of human achievement. She ends, however, on a note of possibility. With awkward and hard work, the product of man might join the angels in ascension. The last line, “The poem ascends,” suggests that in the midst of earthliness, hope remains for revealing a divine truth that surpasses the material world.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The second stanza describes “a rosy stone” that looks soft and “a doubtful, a doubting” gray sky. What place does such a dark and dubious image have in a poem about a solid stone stairway? What point(s) does Levertov make by including the second stanza among the others? Does it add contrast, or does it build upon a singular theme in the poem? 2. Read the Bible story of Jacob found in chapter 28 of Genesis. Does the rabbi’s interpretation make sense to you? Do you see other possibilities for interpreting the passage, and if so, how do those interpretations lend themselves to understanding Levertov’s poem? 3. Note the extreme variance of line length in “The Jacob’s Ladder.” What does the contrast of short and long lines suggest, and how does if affect the poem’s structure? 4. Why might art and religion seek to transcend the physical and material world? What does a

poem expressing such a desire suggest about materiality? Explore the relationship between art and religion. Do they serve similar social purposes?

“In Mind” (1964) Appearing in her 1964 collection O Taste and See, “In Mind” was written relatively early in Levertov’s career. It demonstrates, however, a stylistic and a conceptual maturity that mark the height of her power as a poet. Although it first seems a simple description of two different, or even opposite, women, an attempt to interpret the poem makes clear its propelling suggestive force. Beginning with the title, Levertov positions the poem to comment on more than simply two specific women. “In Mind” leads to (at least) two possibilities. As the fi rst line explains, the women exist “in my mind.” Many critics understand my to mean Levertov herself, or, more generally, the mind of a poet. That reading suggests that the two women symbolize distinct parts of the poet’s consciousness. Levertov often commented on the complexity of her own psyche as well as the psyches of artists in general. However, we can also read the fi rst line as the speaker’s understanding of two distinct stereotypes of women, not necessarily having anything to do with the poet herself. Either way we decide to read the poem, the first line and the title taken together imply some sort of conflict between the two women. First we read of an “unadorned” and “clean” woman described as having straight brown hair and smelling of familiar objects, “apples or grass” (Selected Poems 43). As far as white women within the Western literary tradition go, she is very plain. The second half of the poem describes a more colorful woman adorned with opals and feathers, a woman “who knows strange songs” (43). The speaker conditions both descriptions with qualifiers stated in the negative. The plain woman “has / no imagination.” The “turbulent moon-ridden” woman “is not kind” (43). By highlighting what the women do not have, the speaker implies a lack in their personalities. Lacking

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those qualities—imagination and kindness—the characters seem incomplete and therefore somehow unappealing. The use of enjambment reinforces the tension caused by imperfections. Enjambment is the breaking of a line at an unnatural pause, where it does not end with a comma, a period, or another form of punctuation that forces the reader to pause or stop. Levertov wrote and spoke extensively on the poetic line. She said on numerous occasions that she considered an enjambed line break to be a minor pause in the reading rhythm, something like a halfcomma. Using her rule, then, we notice that the majority of lines in the poem include a pause in places we would not normally add one. The effect breaks up our natural rhythm by disrupting single thoughts. As two women exist within the consciousness of one mind, two ideas often exist within one thought. Notice places in the poem where enjambment creates almost confl icting ideas. For example, Levertov divides “but she has / no imagination” so that reading the fi rst part we assume that the woman has something. The second half of the sentence, however, turns to describe something that she does not have. A similar tension characterizes the entire poem, which dramatizes the confl ict between contrasting but similarly incomplete women. Levertov does not seek to resolve the confl ict or the tension. She constructs a relationship between these women and leaves the reader to ponder why they are entangled and what the entanglement means. As Levertov herself always encouraged social involvement, “In Mind” encourages reader involvement by provoking a desire to understand the relationship it describes.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Levertov’s poems “Earthwoman and Waterwoman” and “The Woman” use similar imagery to create a separation between two types of women. Read all three poems and compare the effect such divisions have on each poem. Do all three create the same sort of tension? Does such a persistent tension have larger implications for Levertov’s depiction of women in poetry?

2. Assuming that Levertov made conscious and careful decisions about the imagery she uses in “In Mind,” write a paper about her intentions. What particular type of women did she want readers to imagine? Where have you encountered women like these in literature before? Do you consider her descriptions archetypical or specific to Levertov’s mind? 3. Knowing that Levertov pays particular attention to lineation, notice how she groups lines in “In Mind.” What do the patterns and indentations suggest about the poem as a whole?

“What Were They Like?” (1967) “What Were They Like?” first appeared in The Sorrow Dance, published in 1967. A few years later it also appeared in To Stay Alive (1971) along with several other previously published poems, including “Olga Poems,” “Life at War,” and “Tenebrae.” She explains in the preface that she included the already published material in To Stay Alive because she began to see them as steps toward a larger work dealing with political, social, and ethical concerns. Seen in two different contexts, “What Were They Like?” spans the years of Levertov’s most focused political protest against the war in Vietnam. As a part of The Sorrow Dance it illustrates her burgeoning interest in the poetics of social activism. To Stay Alive, however, represents the height of Levertov’s outcry against violence in Vietnam, making “What Were They Like?” also part of her most potent efforts to increase awareness and effect change through her writing. As an author who experimented with poetic form, Levertov always sought a structure natural to the content rather than a structure prescribed by tradition. “What Were They Like?” exemplifies her freedom from convention by adopting an unusual organizational device. Rather than separating the poem into typical lines and stanzas, she uses questions and answers. The poem requires us to try out different reading tactics that we might not otherwise consider. For example, reading the poem line by line may prove difficult because the questions easily slip into the background while we are making sense of

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the more elaborate responses. Readers may find it more useful to proceed by reading each response directly after the corresponding answer. By forcing readers to reevaluate their reading strategies, the poem’s structure suggests new or alternative methods to approaching particular problems. The interrogative structure complements the poem’s somewhat journalistic tone and may remind readers of the pervasive media coverage of the Vietnam War. A concise and formal diction marks the questions, while the passive voice in the answers (“It is not remembered,” “the bones were charred,” and “It was reported,” for example) creates a distance by neglecting to assign certain actions to anyone in particular (Poems 1960–1967 234). However, by including alliterative lines and descriptive images, the poem avoids becoming mere journalese. Levertov manages to combine the standardized language of news reporters with a heightened poetic awareness that captures an aspect of the war that many media cannot express. Rather than taking the angle of facts, statistics, or government policy, Levertov draws attention to the violence waged against an entire culture. Each answer details a particular part of the culture lost to war, from the possibility of laughter asked about in question three to the characteristics of speech asked about in question six. The sixth and final answer leaves a particularly poignant impression by describing the remaining voice of Vietnam as an “echo.” The people cannot speak through the rubble of their war-torn country and culture. The poem ends in silence, emphasizing the very thing against which Levertov’s protest poetry struggles. “What Were They Like?” does not restore Vietnam’s culture, but it does draw our attention to the loss of that culture. By approaching the subject of war in an unconventional way, the poem creates an opportunity to raise reader consciousness and increase public sympathy.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Several of the answers address the anonymous questioner as “Sir.” Why would Levertov include a gender-specific title for an otherwise unidentified speaker? What does the gender specification suggest? Notice also that answer five mentions

fathers and sons in response to the question about an epic poem. Do these indications of gender add or detract from the poem’s overall effectiveness? 2. The last question asks whether “they distinguish between speech and singing.” Explore the relationship between speaking and singing. What do you think the poem suggests by relating the two? How does the relationship function to construct an image of the Vietnamese people? 3. Read Levertov’s poem “Life at War,” which appears in the same two collections as “What Were They Like?” and also describes violence in Vietnam. How do the two poems differ? Do you think they accomplish the same thing or two different things? 4. Find a recent news article about war or some other form of organized violence, such as terrorism. Compare and contrast the language in the article to the language in “What Were They Like?” Do the two different genres of writing convey the same information? How do the two pieces of writing affect you as a reader differently?

“A Woman Alone” (1978) Published in 1978 as part of Life in the Forest, “A Woman Alone” belongs to a transitional period in Levertov’s career. She had already passed her most outwardly political stage but had not yet become explicit about her religious beliefs. Instead, she focuses on her very personal life. Other notable poems from the collection include “The 90th Year” and “A Soul-Cake,” both about her mother’s death; “Chekhov on the West Heath,” about her childhood; and “Wedding-Ring,” about the remnants of her marriage. Although indirectly, “A Woman Alone” also deals with her divorce from Mitchell Goodman, which took place in 1974. The poem begins with three incomplete sentences that each end in an ellipsis. Those initial sentences describe different freedoms and luxuries ranging from the joys of being sexually liberated to the pleasure of disconnecting the phone, “to sleep till noon . . .” On fi rst read the unfi nished sentences may create an uneasy anticipation. Because

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they leave us without an immediate answer, we begin to imagine several possibilities. Although it seems fairly clear that these freedoms are pleasant and appreciated, the fi rst line sets a tone of uncertainty. “When she cannot be sure” not only betrays doubt in the subject’s mind but also leaves the reader wondering who the subject “she” is (Selected Poems 110). Along with the understanding that “she” is the woman alone, much of the discomfort dissipates as the tone shifts. Moving from a proselike description of personal liberties, the poem assumes a tighter voice with precise images and closely cropped lines. The poem returns to its initial tone at later points, but for a moment at least, it efficiently dramatizes the tension between struggling with and enjoying solitude. Notably, the initial ambiguity found in the poem’s first line does not completely resolve itself with the shift in tone. We learn that “She has fears, but not about loneliness; / fears about how to deal with the aging / of her body.” She believes “in her future as an old woman,” but photographs and mirrors constantly remind her of her age (110). The problem of “how to deal / with photographs and the mirror” raises questions about stereotypes based on gender (110). In an earlier poem called “Abel’s Bride,” Levertov uses the mirror as a symbol for women’s self-consciousness. As a result of societal demands and popular images of femininity, the physical appearance of women attracts scrutiny. Consider the common image of a half-mad “spinster” living alone with more cats than wits, or the image of an aging widow, lost in the world without her husband. Having overcome loneliness, a woman alone also has to overcome stereotypes and judgments that might depreciate her single life. That “She feels / so much younger and more beautiful / than she looks” speaks to the difficulty of trusting one’s own sense of self rather than the superficial attitudes of a visual society obsessed with youth (110). “A Woman Alone” does not minimize that difficulty, but it does reach past it. By believing in her future she hopes to become “tough and wise” while also remaining content with her current position. The poem ends “without shame or deceit” by praising the solitude she has learned to enjoy (111).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Although she received the support and acclaim of many feminist critics, Levertov refused to count herself among many of her contemporaries as a “women’s liberation” writer. Explain your understanding of feminism and describe how a “A Woman Alone” does or does not fit within that framework. Would you consider Levertov a feminist poet, despite her objections? 2. Read Levertov’s poem “Living Alone,” parts 1, 2, and 3, all of which were published in The Freeing of the Dust only three years before Life in the Forest. How do Levertov’s attitudes toward living alone seem to change? Use specific examples from both poems to support your answer. 3. Levertov often discussed “confessional poetry” with a certain disdain. In an interview with Sybil Estess conducted the year Life in the Forest was published, Levertov argued, “The confessional poem has as its motivational force the desire to unburden the poet of something which he or she finds oppressive. But the danger here is reducing a work of art simply into a process of excretion. A poem is not vomit” (“Denise Levertov” 97). Compare “A Woman Alone” to SYLVIA PLATH’s “Daddy,” perhaps America’s most famous confessional poem. Although their topics differ, do you find similarities in the technique, voice, attitude, or intent? Citing specific examples, discuss the ways in which Levertov may be more or less confessional than Plath.

“Death in Mexico” (1978) Included in Levertov’s 1978 collection Life in the Forest, “Death in Mexico” was published at a time when reflection and contemplation played crucial roles in her creative life. She was still grappling with her divorce from Mitchell Goodman, coming to terms with international violence even after the end of the Vietnam War, and processing the pain of losing her mother. Several of her poems in Life in the Forest touch on the subject of her mother’s death, and others that do not mention it explicitly seem to hint at an underlying grief. Although many

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of the highly personal poems deal with the poet’s suffering, they never slip into the confessional mode she vocally discredited. Published the year after the event, “Death in Mexico” approaches the subject of loss from a unique angle to address more universally resonant images of death and dying. The poem begins by establishing the ground scenario, fixing the reader in a period “two weeks after her fall, / three weeks before she died” and introducing the poem’s dramatic focal point, “the garden / began to vanish” (Poems 1972–1982 103). Rather than focus directly on her dying mother, Levertov tracks the passing of time and a degenerating physical condition through a description of the garden’s decline. Without its caretaker tending to it, the garden slips into a chaotic mess of broken fences, flourishing weeds, and littered children’s toys. Peripheral views of Levertov’s mother sneak in, mirroring the garden’s state and offering readers a view of her desperate condition. For instance, Levertov writes, “For two weeks no one watered it, except / I did, twice, but then I left. She was still conscious then,” implying a later loss of consciousness (103). By taking the garden, rather than Levertov’s mother, as a primary subject, “Death in Mexico” avoids the problem of becoming overly abstract or sentimental. The garden provides a tangible image of deterioration and loss, making Levertov’s expression of pain more tangible as well. While it would be naive to say that the poem reduces abstract concerns with death to the physical, it does put those questions into symbolic language. By attaching meaning to previously unencumbered objects, we open up an opportunity to create new perspectives and generate new ideas. “Death in Mexico” invites us to think about dying as a natural return to the untidy from an ordered ideal. Levertov writes that “there was green, still, / but the garden was disappearing—each day / less sign of the ordered” (104). She suggests that death may not be the wilting, drying up, and relinquishing of life that we often imagine. Rather, it might be an inevitable undoing of controlled existence, a return to the more organic “jungle green,” a time when old gods take “back their own” (104–105). Levertov, however, does not eschew the pain of loss

or become overly optimistic. The stone gaze of the gods “is utterly still, fixed, absolute” (105). It does not allow for tenderness; nor does it recognize life, even as vines and scorpions crawl across its face. As Levertov describes in “Talking to Grief,” another poem from Life in the Forest, she strives to live with her grief. That closeness and honesty allow for poems like “Death in Mexico,” in which she accepts death as a natural process while acknowledging the violence of nature.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Many of Levertov’s poems deal with religion directly and in very clear terms. Her interest in religion, however, does not cease when she delves into less specifically religious subject matter. How might a poem like “Death in Mexico” engage theological perspectives? Do you recognize in the poem any relationship between the Christian parable of the Garden of Eden and the stone representations of indigenous gods? 2. At the end of the poem Levertov acknowledges that she and her mother were both foreign to Mexico. How, then, does the sense of place add to the poem? Why is it important that “Her death / was not Mexico’s business”? And to what end does the title draw our attention to setting? 3. Read another poem from Life in the Forest that deals with the death of Levertov’s mother, “The 90th Year” or “A Soul-Cake,” for example. Look at line break, stanza, and indentation in a comparison of the poems’ structure. In what ways do they differ? Expand your discussion to general tone and feeling. How does Levertov seem to cope with and express her mother’s death differently?

“The May Mornings” (1982) “The May Mornings” appears in Candles in Babylon (1982), one of Levertov’s later collections. Her earlier political poems had by this time earned her negative criticism for their graphic descriptions of violence, proselike quality, and didactic moral messages. Her

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work published in the late 1970s and early 1980s returned to a more personal, reflective mode of expression and a new interest in religious content. Yet it would be inaccurate to say that Levertov backed away from her political stances as an outspoken proponent of peace and leftist agendas. Rather, poems such as “The May Mornings” prove that she could be subtle, tender, and lyrical while also maintaining a critically aware position on social issues. Far from a throwback to her earlier romanticism, the poem uses her strong observational skills and appreciation of nature to comment on the beauty that we lose to war and disinterest. “The May Mornings” opens with a carefully constructed sentence that sounds as pleasing to the ear as the image it describes appears to the eye. Levertov uses alliteration and consonance to affect a softness that complements the description of “cashmere shawls” and “burnished silk” (Poems 1972–1982 198). The repetition of s and sh sounds, strategically punctuated by harder t, d, and b sounds, eases the reader into a quiet lull without becoming muddy or unclear. The following lines remind us that we see these May mornings “approaching / over lawns, trailing / dewdark shadows and footprints” (198). Yet, we have forgotten. The forgetting becomes the poem’s dramatic crux, complicating the simplicity of attractive images and sounds while pulling it away from a purely descriptive endeavor to become critical and proscriptive. Levertov explains the value of remembering the natural beauty: what solace it would have been to think of them, what solace it would be in the bitter violence of fire then ice again . . . (198).

By calling readers to remember the May mornings, Levertov suggests that imaginative concentration on beauty may act as an antidote to the “bitter violence / of fire then ice” (198). During the cold war years she grew increasingly concerned about nuclear warfare and the effect it could have on the world. In one interview she said, “The possibility of total

annihilation that mankind faces as a real possibility in our time has never had a precedent” (Andre 54). Levertov may also be alluding to Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” which briefly alludes to the world’s end. “The May Mornings” does not describe the violence in horrific detail as some of her earlier poems do (“Life at War,” for example). Rather, it leaves it in the background and returns to more pleasant description. The end of the poem, however, does not carry the initial attitude of quiet beauty. The tone changes to something more resigned. She concedes that “it seems the May mornings / are a presence known / only as they pass” (198). Although the poem expresses hope through images of life and “wakening flowers,” a sense of despair acknowledges the threat of violence and indifference.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Levertov sometimes combines words to make an unusual compound word. “The May Mornings” contains three such words: dewdark, lightstepped, and leaflined. What does she achieve by making them one word instead of the grammatically correct two? Would the poem lose something by adhering to convention? 2. Toward the end of the poem, Levertov describes the May mornings as “seriously smiling.” Would you consider that an oxymoron? If so, what does the paradox suggest? How does it challenge the reader to rethink common assumptions? If not, how do you reconcile the attitudinal rift between being serious and smiling? Use specific examples from the poem to bolster your argument. 3. Read William Butler Yeats’s famous poem “The Second Coming,” which he wrote in the aftermath of World War I. Although written at very different points in history, “The Second Coming” and “The May Mornings” share a similar anxiety about the world’s end. Compare their specific references, the lyrical quality of each, and the general attitudes the two poems present. Which poem do you, as a reader years away from either historical context, think holds more relevance today?

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“Caedmon” (1987) Appearing in the 1987 collection Breathing the Water, “Caedmon” stands alongside other religiously themed and historically specific poems such as “The Servant Girl at Emmaus,” “‘I learned that her name was Proverb,’” and “The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342–1426.” Although we can appreciate the aesthetic and technical achievements of the poem without delving into the allusions, when trying to appreciate the poem’s different layers of meaning it becomes necessary to have some background information. Levertov gives us obvious clues for beginning an investigation. The title “Caedmon” is the name of a herdsman who worked for a monastery most of his life. The Venerable Bede tells his story in book 4, chapter 24 of the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (History of the English church and people). Herdsmen commonly entertained themselves by singing and playing music to each other in turn. Caedmon, who did not know how to sing, would leave the party before his turn and on one such occasion went out to the stable to stay with the animals. He dreamed that night of a man who asked him to sing. Caedmon replied that he did not know how to sing, but the man insisted, offering the suggestion that Caedmon sing of creation. Caedmon suddenly burst forth in verse that praised God with words he had never before heard. When he woke he remembered the words and added more verses. Sharing his gift with others, including learned men, Caedmon became famous as a gifted poet who had the ability to turn scripture into song. Although little is known about the actual man, many consider him the first English poet. Levertov writes a dramatic monologue from Caedmon’s first-person perspective based on the Bede’s history. This particular poem demonstrates the reason we tend not to assume that the speaker of a poem and its author are one in the same. It also, however, demonstrates the naïveté of assuming that no connection exists between author and speaker. Levertov makes slight changes to the story to align it more closely to her own sense of the poetic. For instance, Caedmon is awake in her version of the story, and rather than a man, an angel appears to incite his

speech. By depicting a fiery angel who touches Caedmon’s tongue, Levertov enriches the poem with biblical allusions. The scorched tongue could, for example, refer either to the Pentecost or to chapter 6 in the Book of Isaiah, in which Isaiah’s tongue is burned with a coal so that he can tell the world about God. In addition to playing with allusive meanings, Levertov uses form to add depth to the poem. The first 24 lines of “Caedmon” loosely mimic the Old English style of verse, which uses stressed syllables and alliteration to create balanced halves within each line. Notice, for example, the use of alliteration to organize the following lines: “I’d wipe my / mouth and wend / unnoticed back to the barn / to be with the warm beasts” (italics mine). With the word Until, however, the angel appears and the poem takes on a freer form, using indentations and repetition to suggest the liberty of being able to use language as one chooses (Selected Poems 149).

For Discussion or Writing 1. The poem begins and ends with the same image of “the ring of the dance.” What effect does the repetition have, and what significance might it have for the poem as a whole? 2. In “Caedmon” and other poems, Levertov uses religion to define the creative process. What sort of relationship does she establish or suggest between art and religion? 3. Levertov considered “St. Peter and the Angel,” published three years earlier in Oblique Prayers, a companion piece to “Caedmon.” Compare the two poems and, using specific examples from each, explain why they do or do not relate.

“Making Peace” (1987) Published in 1987 as part of a collection titled Breathing the Water, “Making Peace” was written at a time when Levertov had already established herself as a politically engaged poet, having written, published, and protested throughout the Vietnam War. Although previous to Breathing the Water, the 1980s saw a period of concern with more explicitly religious matters, social issues never left her sphere of

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imagination. “Making Peace,” even without the devastating imagery found in some of her Vietnam-era poetry, clearly demonstrates her continued sense of distress over the violent political climate. Indeed, it makes apparent the increasing sense of responsibility she, as a writer, accepted for the failure of a culture to imagine peace. The poem begins with an insistence that poets have a responsibility to “give us / imagination of peace . . . Peace, not only / the absence of war” (Selected Poems 150). The excerpt also uses the italicized phrase “imagination of disaster,” which Levertov in an explanatory note attributes to Henry James. She goes on to say in the same note that imagination makes reality real to the mind (214). With that understanding, the difficulty of imagining peace becomes clear. Because we have not lived within a reality of peace, our imaginations have a hard time drawing upon an experience that would allow us to fathom it. The first stanza of “Making Peace” along with its companion note presents a dilemma: How can we imagine peace without experiencing it? And, how can we experience peace without fi rst imagining it? The poem explores that paradox and poses a solution, suggesting a way of literally “Making Peace.” The crux of the solution rests on a metaphor. Metaphor, a literary device common in poetry, compares two seemingly unlike things by equating them. In this case, Levertov compares the process of writing poetry with the process of creating peace. She writes that peace “can’t be imagined before it is made”: can’t be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid. (150)

By using literary terms usually employed to discuss the mechanics of poetry—such as rhythm, syntax, stanza, line—to discuss peace, she suggests that we can imagine peace only as a poet imagines a poem before it exists. In other words, she argues that poems and peace are made through a process of creation and that imagination does not exist outside

that process. The action of imagining and the action of creating are simultaneous. Although the poem seems to resolve the dilemma philosophically by offering a new framework for thinking about imagination, it does not offer a fi nal answer. As is common in Levertov’s poetry, “Making Peace” retains a sense of mystery. The second half of the poem discusses the possibility of restructuring “the sentence our lives are making” (150). The gerund form of the verb to make indicates that the process of creation is unfinished and continuous. While the pessimistic view that things are going poorly marks “Making Peace,” a more optimistic awareness of new possibilities also presents itself. The poem ends with a bright image of vibrating light, “facets of the forming crystal.” A structure “of profit and power” exists, but it is undergoing formation and change (150).

For Discussion or Writing 1. “Making Peace” is not the only poem in which Levertov discusses poetry. Read other poems that have a similar self-awareness of their own medium—such as “The Jacob’s Ladder,” “Illustrious Ancestors,” and “Poem”—and compare the attitudes, the styles, and the methods used to explore the subject of poetry itself. Does Levertov present a consistent vision, or do specific poems offer specific views? 2. The poem differentiates between peace and “the absence of war.” Using the poem to support your response, explain the differences between the two states of nonviolence. Why would anyone consider peace more desirable than simply an end to warfare? If you do not believe that there is a difference between the two, construct a convincing argument to support your position and use the poem for specific discussion points.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON LEVERTOV AND HER WORK 1. Listen to or read the lyrics of Merle Haggard’s hit song “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” released in 1970. Assuming that his song and Levertov’s

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protest poetry both express sentiments common in America during the period, what can you say about the U.S. political climate surrounding the Vietnam War? Does your comparison of the two artistic statements lead you to draw any conclusions about American culture? 2. Levertov once claimed that the question of how gender has influenced her work “is as baffl ing as it would be to be asked how my life has been affected by having brown eyes.” And yet, Levertov frequently wrote provocatively about sexism and the experience of being a woman, leading critics to group her together with contemporaries such as Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser under the common heading “feminist.” Read Levertov’s “Hypocrite Women,” Rukeyser’s “Despisals,” and Rich’s “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” all of which challenge both the dominance of masculinity and feminist responses to it. Why might these three poets avoid the label feminist or the attitudes subsumed under it? Can a woman (or a man) be considered feminist if he or she criticizes feminism? Finally, consider Levertov’s body of work; where does she fall in relation to the lines drawn around feminism? 3. Many of Levertov’s early critics claimed that by focusing on the objects of everyday perceptual experience, such as toilet seats (see “Matins”), she produced banal poetry. Levertov, however, believed that poetic language exposed the intrinsic beauty of such commonplace items. Choose several examples of her poetry that focus on subjects that might not seem appropriate literary content. Does her writing draw new meaning from or reveal the beauty of such mundane objects? Is she more successful in some poems than others? Cite specific examples to support your argument. 4. Many poets believe that only so many poetic forms exist and that one cannot help but repeat them. Levertov, however, sought new forms to address her subject matter better. Read “Merritt Parkway,” “Relearning the Alphabet,” “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus,” and “What Were They Like?” Do you consider any of the poems to use a unique or new form? What does Levertov’s willingness to experiment allow her to

achieve that a traditional form—such as the sonnet or villanelle—might prevent? 5. Levertov often expressed her reluctance to claim a particular cultural identity. She preferred to acknowledge her varied background in an effort to maintain its unique combinations of intellectual, spiritual, and geographical influences. While the diversity undoubtedly served to enrich her poetry, it also resists any attempt to categorize her or her writing. Reflecting on your own experience, what does it mean to be an American artist? Must one possess certain characteristic traits to be American? And, finally, considering Levertov’s poetry, does she qualify, in your mind, as an American author? Using specific examples from her body of work, explain why or why not. WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Barthelme, Donald. The Dead Father. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975. Bede the Venerable. Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. Translated by Leo Sherley-Price. New York: Penguin, 1968. Breslin, Paul. “Black Mountain Reunion.” Poetry (June 2000): 159–170. Buber, Martin. Tales of the Hasidim: Later Masters. New York: Chicken Books, 1948. Capps, Donald. The Poet’s Gift: Toward the Renewal of Pastoral Care. Louisville, Ky.: Westminister/John Knox, 1993. Colclough Little, Anne, and Susie Paul, eds. Denise Levertov: New Perspectives. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 2000. Corrigan, Chris. “Poems by Denise Levertov.” Available online. URL: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/ parkinglot/levertov.htm. Accessed November 2006. Gelpi, Albert, ed. Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Halliesy, Joan F., ed. “Denise Levertov (b. 1923).” Available online. URL: http://college.hmco.com/ english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/levertov.html. Accessed November 26, 2006. Kinnahan, Linda A. Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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Lancashire, Ian. “Caedmon (f. 658–680).” University of Toronto. 2005. Available online. URL: http:// rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/369.html. Accessed November 26, 2006. Levertov, Denise. “A Conversation with Denise Levertov.” By Kenneth John Atchity. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ———. “A Conversation with Denise Levertov.” By Walter Sutton. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ———. “Craft Interview with Denise Levertov.” By William Packard. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ———. “Denise Levertov.” By Sybil Estess. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ———. “‘Everyman’s Land: Ian Reid Interviews Denise Levertov.” By Ian Reid. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ———. “An Interview with Denise Levertov.” By Maureen Smith. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ———. “An Interview with Denise Levertov.” By Terrell Crouch. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ———. “Invocations of Humanity: Denise Levertov’s Poetry of Emotion and Belief.” By Joan F. Hallisey. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. ———. The Jacob’s Ladder. New York: New Directions, 1961. ———. “Levertov: A Poet Heeds the Socio-Political Call.” By Penelope Moffet. In Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

———. Poems 1960–1967. New York: New Directions, 1983. ———. Poems 1972–1982. New York: New Directions, 2001. ———. Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973. ———. “A Sack Full of Wings.” In Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions. New York: New Directions, 1995. ———. Selected Poems. Edited by Paul A. Lacey. New York: New Directions, 2002. MacGowan, Christopher, ed. The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1998. Marten, Harry. Understanding Denise Levertov. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Mersmann, James. Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry against the War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974. Modern American Poetry. “Denise Levertov (1923–1997).” University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. Available online. URL: http://www. english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/levertov/ levertov.htm. Accessed November 26, 2006. Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Rexroth, Kenneth. “The Poetry of Denise Levertov.” In Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, edited by Albert Gelpi. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892–1910. Translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton. New York: Norton, 1945. Rodgers, Audrey T. Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engagement. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Spears Brooker, Jewel, ed. Conversations with Denise Levertov. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1959.

David D. Squires

Robert Lowell (1917–1977) A lot of poetry seems to me very good in the tradition but just doesn’t move me very much because it doesn’t have personal vibrance to it. I probably exaggerate the value of it, but it’s precious to me. (Paris Review interview)

R

obert Traill Spence Lowell IV was born March 1, 1917, to Robert Traill Spence Lowell III and Charlotte Winslow Lowell. He grew up in Boston as their only child, attending the private Brimmer School as a child and St. Mark’s Preparatory as a young man. The Lowell family has a prominent lineage that traces back to the earliest Protestant settlers in New England. This lineage includes the poets James Russell Lowell, a contemporary of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Amy Lowell, a contemporary of Ezra Pound, as well as an assortment of successful academicians and military officers. Although the family name had lost some of its luster by the early to mid-20th century, it once held the public interest strongly enough to be included in John Collins Bossidy’s famous toast: And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God.

Lowell’s father graduated from Harvard, joined the navy, and, after a mediocre career as a naval officer, left the military at his wife’s urging to work as a businessman for the Lever Brothers’ Soap Company. In “91 Revere Street,” a narrative fragment that constitutes the second section of Life Studies (1959), Lowell writes about his “father’s downhill progress as a civilian and Bostonian” (147). In

contrast to the Lowell ancestors, the photographs and the toy soldiers to which Lowell compared his father, the soap executive, appears tragic and buffoonish. In Lowell’s rendering, his mother becomes a dominating figure whose marriage forces her to squander her energies. Of himself he writes, “I was less rather than more bookish than most children” (135). By other accounts, however, Lowell decided to become a poet at a young age, spent his free time studying the English tradition, and forced friends to read works that interested him so they would have a common ground for discussion. At St. Mark’s Preparatory, Lowell studied under the direction of Richard Eberhart, who encouraged him to write. Although Lowell never had a class with Eberhart, they spent time together discussing and reading poetry. After four years at St. Mark’s Lowell followed a family tradition and enrolled at Harvard. While there he met and fell in love with a woman named Anne Dick. The romance and proposed marriage led to a dispute with Lowell’s parents, and Lowell, enraged, physically attacked his father. Both the poem “Rebellion” from Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and “Anne Dick 1. 1986” from History (1973) mention the event. His parents called upon the poet and psychologist Merrill Moore to assess their son’s mental state. Grasping the difficulties that he was having at Harvard, Merrill suggested that Lowell study with a poet, thus inspiring Lowell’s looking

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south for cultural sanctuary from industrial New England. At about the same time, Lowell had met the poet Allen Tate, who became an important mentor and who also encouraged him to study with a poet. After two years he left Harvard to begin studying with the poet-critic John Crowe Ransom, one of Tate’s mentors, at Kenyon College in Ohio. Many years later in an interview for the Paris Review, Lowell talked about his parents’ reaction to the move, saying only that “it seemed to them a queer but orderly step” (29). The summer before starting at Kenyon, Lowell traveled to Clarksville, Tennessee, to visit Allen and Caroline Tate. In Paris Review he explained that, having three guests already and no place to put him, the Tates jokingly suggested that he would have to pitch a tent on their lawn. He explained that “the Tates were too polite to tell me that what they’d said had been just a figure of speech. I stayed two months in my tent and ate with the Tates” (30). Under Tate’s influence Lowell continued writing poetry and contemplating its practice while also sharing his work and spending time with important literary figures, such as Ford Maddox Ford, who passed through the Tate home. He left their yard to begin study at Kenyon in fall 1937. While there he befriended R ANDALL JARRELL and Peter Taylor, both of whom went on to have successful writing careers. By 1940 he had graduated summa cum laude with a degree in classics and decided to marry the writer Jean Stafford. That same year Lowell moved to Baton Rouge to continue his studies with the critic Cleanth Brooks and the author ROBERT P ENN WARREN at Louisiana State University. There his training focused more directly on English. The time Lowell spent in the South helped him get through a difficult period in his life and have a successful university career. More than that, though, it shaped him as a writer and a thinker, giving him a new framework within which he could explore his early poetic sensibilities. Although New Criticism had not yet become an institutionalized literary movement or theory, all of Lowell’s mentors—Tate, Ransom, Warren, and Brooks—were among its foundational members and earliest proponents. Their interest in poetic form,

tradition, and the text as an autonomous object of art influenced his fi rst years of writing poetry. In those years he also eschewed his Protestant heritage and converted to Roman Catholicism, which seemed to him much more sincere and authentic. Having struck his father, left Harvard, moved to the South, and fi nally rejected Protestantism, Lowell estranged himself from his family. He continued to separate himself when he refused military induction in 1943. When the United States joined War World II in 1941, Lowell volunteered his service but was turned down because of his poor eyesight. By the time he received a conscription notice in 1943 he could no longer justify the nation’s war efforts, having learned of innocent Germans fi rebombed in Dresden. He declared himself a conscientious objector and, as a result, served fi ve months in prison at the West Street Detention Center in New York and the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. He completed the sentence doing community service in Black Rock, Connecticut. His time in jail provided the material for his poem “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” while his community service time gave him an opportunity to fi nish work on his fi rst book, Land of Unlikeness, which was published in 1944. Despite Allen Tate’s generous introduction, Land of Unlikeness received no notable critical acclaim. Lowell spent the next two years living in Maine, working on revisions of many of the poems included in his fi rst effort. His work during that time produced a second body of new poetry that included several poems from the fi rst collection. Lowell took the title for his second book from the violent old Scottish ballad “Lambkin” and published the collection in 1946. Lord Weary’s Castle attracted much more attention than Land of Unlikeness, earned Lowell a Pulitzer Prize, and secured his place among important young writers emerging in the middle of the 20th century. Each poem in the book makes use of a formal pattern, whether of the poet’s own creation or borrowed from some other poet and adapted to the specific circumstances. The work as a whole marks an important beginning for Lowell, who was struggling with his

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new Catholic faith against the background of his Protestant history. Furthermore, his use of more traditional, formal poetic structures marks a turn away from the free-verse experimentalism ushered in by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and E.E. Cummings. In the five years between Lord Weary’s Castle and his third book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), Lowell’s life underwent a number of drastic changes. He and Jean Stafford separated, and he left the Catholic Church, moved to New York, befriended William Carlos Williams, spent time in a psychiatric hospital, married the writer Elizabeth Hardwick, lost his father, and moved to Europe. The poetry he wrote during those years, however, remained very similar to what he had published in his fi rst two books. In the years following publication of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, however, Lowell began teaching a younger generation of poets and, at the suggestion of psychiatrists, began writing about his childhood. After years of intense selfreflection along with the influence of Williams’s more colloquial poetry, Lowell started to work on much looser verse. He published his groundbreaking collection Life Studies, which explored the relationship between his own psyche and his surroundings, in 1959. While some of his longtime endorsers, such as Tate, disliked his new style of writing, many consider it as an important development in American poetry, on par with T. S. Eliot’s publication of The Waste Land (1922). His personal and largely autobiographical poems quickly became the foundation for an entire movement of American verse, earning him the somewhat bombastic title “Father of Confessional Poetry.” The year after publishing Life Studies, Lowell read his famous poem “For the Union Dead” at the Boston Arts Festival, for which he wrote it. “For the Union Dead,” which later became the title poem for his 1964 collection, exhibits Lowell’s more politically conscious side as an artist. Despite his tumultuous personal life, marred by mental and emotional illness as well as continuous difficulty in marriage, he managed to live a rather public life. In 1965 he declined President Johnson’s invitation to the White House Arts Festival because of his oppo-

sition to the Vietnam War. He wrote in a letter to the president, “I thought of such an occasion as a purely artistic flourish, even though every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments” (New York Times, June 3, 1965, p. 2). In 1967 he joined Norman Mailer, DENISE LEVERTOV, A LLEN GINSBERG, and many others in the march on the Pentagon, to protest the Vietnam War once again. In addition to capturing his political discontent, “For the Union Dead” stands at the pinnacle of Lowell’s career as perhaps the most successful of his poems to blend personal and public history. After divorcing Elizabeth Hardwick and marrying Caroline Blackwood in 1972, he released three books at the same time, all of which were based on the earlier collection Notebook (1969). History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin present a vast collection of poems based on the sonnet—most composed of 14 lines using roughly iambic pentameter, but few of them rhymed—that document his reactions to contemporary events and his musings on American history intertwined with details about his ancestral history and the difficulties of his personal life. His efforts to fuse the personal and the public in The Dolphin earned him another Pulitzer Prize. Many critics, however, argue that the length of the three books, their adherence to the sonnet form, and the overly personal details create a mediocre version of what he accomplished in his early collections. Despite criticisms of some of those later works, Lowell continues to be remembered as one of America’s most important postwar poets. While writing he also taught at a number of prominent American schools, including Harvard University, the Kenyon School of Letters, and Boston University. His students included A NNE SEXTON, S YLVIA PLATH, and W. D. Snodgrass, all of whom carried Lowell’s influence into their most important works. During his career he published translations of poetry, translations of plays, his own plays, prose, and a prolific body of poetry that situates the author within personal and public experience that spans the entirety of Anglo-American history. For all his literary successes, however, he never found complete fulfi llment in his personal life. In 1977

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he left Caroline Blackwood in England to return to his former wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. He suffered a heart attack and died during the cab ride from the airport to her home in Manhattan. Day by Day, Lowell’s last collection of original poetry, was published the same year.

“Colloquy in Black Rock” (1946) Lowell wrote “Colloquy in Black Rock” while living in Black Rock, Connecticut, completing his parole as a conscientious objector. He was sentenced to “A year and a day,” as he writes in the third stanza, for refusing to take part in World War II, which he considered an immoral war because of the number of civilian deaths resulting from American bombing. He worked there in a Catholic nurses’ dormitory as a janitor. According to Lowell, he had not written anything for a year when he sat down to write “Colloquy.” The poem was written at a point in Lowell’s life when he was struggling with his rejection of the Protestant faith. He had converted to Catholicism, and the poem draws much of its imagery and symbolic content from Catholic tradition. As much of Lowell’s poetry does, “Colloquy” combines his personal experiences with a broader social context of historical and political attitudes. On one level the poem depicts the town of Black Rock, and its mudflats, Black Mud, both of which are located just south of Bridgeport, Connecticut. It includes mention of the “Hungarian workmen” who composed a large segment of Bridgeport’s population, working at the town’s helicopter factory and attending St. Stephen’s Catholic Church. “Colloquy” goes on to connect the community’s name to its physical characteristics: “Black Mud: a name to conjure with: O mud / For watermelons gutted to the crust, / Mud for the mole-tide harbor, for the mouse, / Mud for the armored Diesel fi shing tubs that thud” (11). By repeating the word mud within the string of associational descriptions Lowell consolidates his vocabulary to one main descriptor. He presents a

dense image of the town itself concurrent with his experience of it. More than just the poem’s most prominent image, mud also serves as a unifying symbol that ties together the religious and psychological content. The fi rst four stanzas present a dark vision of the dirty industrial city, where “the jack-hammer jabs into the ocean” and “All discussions / End in the mud-flat detritus of death” (11). Through Lowell’s perception, mud represents the violence of life. In the fi rst and third stanzas that violence tends toward descriptive expression, reflecting on the author’s psyche. The second and fourth stanzas, however, introduce religious imagery by mentioning the martyr Stephen, with a particular focus on death, blood, and, of course, mud. The fi nal stanza extends the religious content to include another martyr, Jesus Christ. Unlike St. Stephen, Christ does not die in the mud but rather walks on top of “the black water” (11). Here Lowell is alluding to a Bible verse, John 6:19, in which Jesus walks across the turbulent sea to meet the disciples and then calms the waters after they take him into his boat. The kingfi sher, fabled to have calming powers over wind and waves, connects Jesus to the transformative act of the last lines. By escaping life’s mud, the bird reasserts the sacrificial image of blood and cleanses the heart with fi re. Trying to tie the poem’s symbolic meanings back into Lowell’s biography presents some difficulties. Can we say that he sees himself as a martyr suffering for his conscientious objection to war? Is “Colloquy” a prayer for redemption from the sins, or mud, of this world? Regardless of what we decide about Lowell’s place in the poem, it presents a sense of hope that many critics refuse to allow the poet. Through his poetry, though, Lowell reveals himself as a complex character, in both hope and despair.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In the fi rst stanza of “Colloquy in Black Rock” Lowell uses the racialized term nigger-brass percussions. The description derives its denotative meaning from derogatory remarks about

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black music in the fi rst half of the 20th century. Jazz bands in New Orleans, for example, were often called “nigger brass” and regarded by genteel folks as culturally and physically dangerous. What additional meanings does the word assume when used in the context of “Colloquy,” a poem that uses blackness as both a descriptive adjective and a proper noun? What does the poem say, or not say, about race? Expand your discussion by comparing the role of race in “Colloquy” to the role of race in “For the Union Dead.” 2. A colloquy is a formal discussion or a written dialogue and implies the presence of more than one voice. Considering the poem’s structure, syntax, and diction, does anything about “Colloquy in Black Rock” suggest a conversation? How does the claim “All discussions / End in the mud-flat detritus of death” change your understanding of the title’s overall significance to the poem’s meaning?

“Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (1946) Published in Lord Weary’s Castle, “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” incorporates passages from three different texts by the Protestant preacher Jonathan Edwards. Associated with early American Puritanism, Edwards’s writings defend Calvinism and epitomize the fi re-and-brimstone approach to preaching. He generally articulated a pessimistic view on the state of humanity, often attempting to strike fear into the hearts of his congregation by telling of an all-powerful God who held modern people in contempt. That position developed from one of Calvinism’s five main tenets, which holds that God’s grace alone saves an individual and that there is nothing anyone can do to save himself or herself. Considering the poem’s context within Lord Weary’s Castle, most critics read “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” as a resolute condemnation of Edwards and his theology, meant to portray him as treacherous and angry. Although not entirely unfounded,

such one-sided readings fail to recognize the complexity of the source material and ignore Lowell’s relationship to it. The poem presents Edwards’s voice in the fi rst person, allowing us to encounter the preacher directly and encouraging us to note the rhetoric. If they prove anything about him, Edwards’s dramatic sermons attest to his skill as a master rhetorician. Lowell preserves the original language used in the three essays he draws from as faithfully as possible, managing to fit it within the poem’s strict structure. The fi rst stanza summarizes a passage from the essay “Of Insects,” which Edwards wrote at age 11. Notice the awe-inspired image of “spiders marching through the air,” which Lowell takes directly from the essay (59). The fi rst lines of “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” highlight Edwards’s fascination with nature and the simple wonders of the world. Although the second half of the stanza begins to reveal a fascination with death, our initial impression of Edwards gives his character humanity. By the third stanza, however, Edwards’s mild preoccupation with powerlessness in the face of destruction becomes much more morbid. Borrowed from the essay “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” we read: “It’s well / If God who holds you to the pit of hell / Much as one holds a spider, will destroy / Baffle and dissipate your soul” (59). It is difficult to understand circumstances under which it is good that God might destroy a human soul. Lowell manifests his unspoken criticisms by displaying Edwards’s violent fanaticism. The last stanza, though, connects Lowell to the poem’s content and makes clear his ambivalence toward both Edwards and the Protestant faith he represents. When we read the name Josiah Hawley, we realize that the entire fiery monologue is directed at an individual: The poem admonishes the soul of Edwards’s uncle because he committed suicide, which introduces Lowell into the poem by way of his own well-documented bouts of mental illness and depression. The poet endures most of the preacher’s Protestant-informed warning against impropriety through depression. In this case, though, Lowell is both the victim and the product

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of Edwards’s moralizing by virtue of his cultural and religious background. This complex portrait of an important Puritan figure, then, explores the different, and sometimes confl icted, aspects of Lowell’s identity. Far from simple, the poem actually moderates some of the “fi re breathing” Catholicism present elsewhere in his poetry.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Lowell structured “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” using John Donne’s “A Nocturnal on St. Lucy’s Day” as a model. Although the content of the poems differ drastically, Lowell made a conscious decision in choosing the stanzas’ pattern and rhyme scheme. Read each and compare the use of indentation, line break, rhyme, and meter. How does the structure of “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” take on meaning in the poem? 2. The three Edwards essays Lowell uses to compose “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” deal with themes that run throughout Lord Weary’s Castle, and yet Lowell is not wholly sympathetic to Edwards’s ideas about despair, eternity, suicide, and living in the presence of a great God. Read “Of Insects” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and “The Future Punishment of the Wicked.” How do the two authors approach the same subjects in different ways? Discuss different points of departure. 3. “After the Surprising Conversions” directly follows “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” in Lord Weary’s Castle, and they are often read in conjunction. “After the Surprising Conversions” also draws upon a Jonathan Edwards letter known as “Narrative of Surprising Conversions” as its main source of content. Read both and discuss differences and similarities, focusing on tone and diction. 4. The fi nal lines of “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” tell what death is: “To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death” (60). Consider those last lines in relation to the rest of the poem. Do they fi nalize what has already been said in the poem? Why does Lowell only name a specific spider at the end? What does his description of death mean to you?

“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” (1946) Dedicated to his cousin Warren Winslow, who died while serving in World War II, “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” fi rst appeared in the Partisan Review in 1945. It was later revised and collected in Lord Weary’s Castle with additional passages not originally published. Structured in seven parts, with various rhyme schemes, the poem exhibits Lowell’s early preoccupation with formalism and the aural qualities of his poetry. It also demonstrates his tendency to pull together literary, biblical, classical, historical, and biographical allusions into one complicated arrangement. Allusion in poetry functions by indirectly referencing another work and thereby incorporating already established symbolic meaning. Many critics argue that “Graveyard” exemplifies Lowell’s ability to cultivate powerful symbolism by alluding to the long tradition within which he writes. Others, however, argue that the barrage of references convolutes the meaning and detracts from the poem’s overall success. Whether successful or not, the poem certainly demands that the reader have a lot of prior knowledge in order to attempt to understand even its most basic meanings. It helps to know, for instance, that Ahab is in Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851) and is captain of a ship named the Pequod. Ahab hunts Moby Dick, the mythical white sperm whale, for revenge but eventually drowns trying to kill him. Lowell associates this character with America’s fanatical idealism. In an interview he explained, “I always think there are two great symbolic figures that stand behind American ambition and culture. One is [John] Milton’s Lucifer and the other is Captain Ahab: these two sublime ambitions that are doomed and ready, for their idealism, to face any amount of violence” (Meyers 105). “Graveyard” includes numerous mentions of Ahab’s enemy, the white whale, but they do not establish a clear significance. He appears alternately as the “hurt beast” and the “whited monster,” embodying contradictory personae that resist interpretation with a single symbolic value.

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The sea—actually the Atlantic Ocean—takes on similarly complicated and contradictory meanings in the poem. Toward the end of the fi rst section, Lowell writes, “When you are powerless / To sandbag this Atlantic bulwark, faced / By the earthshaker” (14). The “earth-shaker” refers to Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas and earthquakes, and suggests a violent and defensive sea. In that sense we can understand Moby Dick, the whale, as being an agent of the sea’s anger, or an instrument of God. There are also several references throughout the poem to leviathans, which in the Bible is a scaly sea monster. In the more secular usage, though, the word leviathan refers to large creatures and has been used to describe both whales and ships. The different denotations complicate Lowell’s meaning, of course, as the reader attempts to parse out the relationships among the sea, the seagoers, and the sea creatures. The sea’s changing demeanor makes it difficult to settle on any absolute understanding. In the fi rst section we fi nd an unforgiving and powerful sea. In the second we see an image of the sea as vulnerable as the Quakers it kills: “The wind’s wings beat upon the stones, / Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush / At the sea’s throat and wring it in the slush” (15). Finally, at the end of the poem we learn that the Atlantic is “fouled” by people, monsters, and fishes, suggesting that it once had a purity found in none of the others. The poem fails to attach particular values to its many images and allusions. That failure, though, allows Lowell to convey the difficulty of working within such a large and violent tradition. “Graveyard” takes on symbolism as a sinking ship takes on water. By becoming inundated it demonstrates the hardship of relating to a tradition that presents contradictions and confusions. Under Lowell’s control, however, the rhythmic structures and imagery retain clarity and make reading the poem an engaging experience. The fi nal passage, for instance, suggests resolution through a careful shift in tone. The last line, however, has sparked a deluge of critical curiosity and speculation denying us a resolution and instead forcing us to reconsider the poem at every turn.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The fi rst half of the fi rst stanza borrows imagery from the fi rst chapter of Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod (1865). Lowell’s later poem “The Dolphin” repeats the imagery of drowning entangled by knots. Read each of the examples and discuss how the same image can be used to create different meanings. Pay particular attention to tone and structuring technique. 2. In the third section, the initials IS appear to describe “the whited monster.” The whited monster probably is Moby Dick, the sperm whale, while IS may be less certain. The fi rst printings of the poem read, “Of is, the swashing castle.” Some say the edit introduced a typo into the text, while others believe that IS references Iesus Salvator, Latin for “Jesus the Savior.” If IS signifies Jesus Christ, then Lowell invites the reader to associate Moby Dick with the Son of God. What implications would that understanding have for the rest of the poem? 3. The sixth section of “Graveyard” breaks sharply from the New England scene to describe the Carmelite Monastery of Walsingham, in Norfolk, England, which was a popular shrine to Mary before being destroyed in 1538. How does this section relate to the rest of the poem? What does Lowell accomplish by including it? Feel free to conduct additional research on the monastery, Catholicism, or Lowell to include in your response.

“Memories of West Street and Lepke” (1959) First collected in Life Studies, “Memories of West Street and Lepke” documents the 10 days Lowell spent in the West Street, New York City, jail for being a conscientious objector. As do “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” and many other poems in this groundbreaking book, the poem employs a much more conversational diction than his early poetry. Unlike “My Last Afternoon,” however, this poem retains some of the traditional poetic characteristics that defi ned his early work.

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For instance, Lowell rhymes much of “Memories of West Street and Lepke.” In the fi rst stanza we see “book-worming / each morning,” “man / cans / Republican,” and “daughter / granddaughter / infant’s wear.” By varying the rhythm and tightness of rhyme, however, the structure resists a particular scheme or pattern. Lowell builds a very subtle aural relationship between the lines that differs aesthetically from both his very traditional mode of writing and his strictly free-verse mode. Lowell uses the more moderate style to explore the extremes of his political position within a rapidly changing society. The poem begins by making several observations about his personal living situation and the general 1950s cultural scenario. The fi rst three lines describe the author as a domesticated professor tucked away in his large, mundane house. The quote about Marlborough Street hints at Lowell’s discontent with his dispassionate environment. The following lines make that discontent more explicit by satirically commenting upon the homogeneity of his upper-middle-class neighborhood. After establishing himself as a professor, father, and rich white man—ostensible aspects of institutionalized America—Lowell launches into a recollection of his “seedtime” during the 1940s. As a “fi re-breathing Catholic C.O.,” Lowell spent time in jail, where the population seemed much more dangerous and diverse than his “Young Republican” neighbors. He tells of a “Negro boy,” a vegetarian, a Jehovah’s Witness, two “Hollywood pimps” (actually extortionists), and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, head of a band of murderers for hire nicknamed Murder Incorporated. The subtly humorous description of jail adds a tone of levity to the poem, even endearing some of the prisoners to the reader. The fi nal image, however, uses that sympathy for Lepke to take the tone down to a more serious level. We see him concentrating on his demise, the electric chair, before Lowell fi nishes the poem with two abstract and inexplicable lines: “hanging like an oasis in his air / of lost connections. . . .” (ellipses Lowell’s 188). Many critics assess the poem as ultimately pessimistic on the basis of those fi nal lines. We could read the image of Lowell’s young, brightly clothed

daughter as a hopeful symbol of the future, but even he, old enough to be her grandfather, suggests wasted years of misdirection. With that in mind, the fi nal two lines connect Lepke to Lowell through the experience of “lost connections.” We see in “Memories of West Street and Lepke” the poet looking back over the past two decades of his life and reevaluating his political, social, and artistic positions. Rather than offer us a wholly optimistic or pessimistic perspective, Lowell attempts to reconcile contradictory aspects of his life by connecting them in his writing.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In “Colloquy in Black Rock” Lowell uses the racialized phrase “nigger-brass percussions” (11). “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” written about 10 years later during an era of heightened racial awareness, includes an updated phrase, “Negro boy.” Despite the change in terminology, how do the two poems signal and use race in a similar way? Does the more politically correct use of Negro lessen the political repercussions of Lowell’s depiction of race? 2. In the second stanza Lowell asks, “Ought I to regret my seedtime?” (187). The suggestion that he might regret the idealism of his youth seems peculiar in a poem so critical of the tranquillity of his middle age. What else might Lowell mean by the word regret? In your own words, what does the question ask? 3. Lowell greatly admired Ezra Pound’s poetry and helped award him the Bolligen Prize. He mentioned several times that he particularly liked Pound’s Pisan Cantos (1948), which discuss Pound’s time incarcerated. Read the Pisan Cantos and the way Pound and Lowell treat the experience of imprisonment.

“My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” (1959) Lowell rewrote sections of “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” several times and published part 3 in Botteghe Oscure before collect-

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ing the poem as a whole in his most famous book, Life Studies. Life Studies was published in 1959, eight years after The Mills of the Kavanaughs, and marked a great redirection in Lowell’s writing. In the wake of several emotional and mental breakdowns, he sought psychological treatment, which led him to write about his childhood. The frankly personal prose he produced became the source of many of the poems included in Life Studies, particularly in the fourth section of the book. “My Last Afternoon” is the fi rst poem in that section. Unlike the formal verse of Lord Weary’s Castle or the epic monologues of The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies includes free-verse poems that detail the specificities of Lowell’s life and disclose the troubled state of his mind. Part 1 exemplifies the more relaxed tone of Lowell’s so-called confessional poetry: “One afternoon in 1922, / I sat on the stone porch, looking through / screens as black-grained as drifting coal” (163). The natural voice, although divided into lines, reads as prose. Indeed, much of the poem was derived from Lowell’s autobiographical notes, and, taking a cue from William Carlos Williams, he tried to achieve “a tone that sounded a little like conversation” (Axelrod, Life and Art 95). Some critics have lambasted Life Studies in general and “My Last Afternoon” in particular for the loss of the intensity found in Lowell’s earlier works. While they tend to make concessions for certain poems—such as “Skunk Hour”—the common argument runs that the work relaxes to the point of becoming slack. One particularly critical writer, William Bedford, claims: Not only does there appear to be no poetic logic behind the choice of line lengths, or behind the random selection of detail . . . not only does the technique fail utterly to generate any sense of moral urgency or significance; but the very flatness of the language leaves one with a strong suspicion that Lowell has merely sought to make verses out of his prose material simply in order to have sufficient poems to fi ll a volume. (Mosaic 19, no. 4 [Fall 1986]: 121–132)

Despite such assessments, however, “My Last Afternoon” does retain distinctly poetic attributes. Part 3, for instance, demonstrates concision, introduces strong images, and makes subtle use of slant rhyme. On the whole, “My Last Afternoon” signals a simpler and more understated poetic voice for Lowell, while the content continues to involve complex subjects. The plain language renders difficult pictures of failed commitments, family tensions, and chronic illness, all seen in relation to Lowell as a five-and-a-half-year-old. The language may lack a certain dramatic pitch that Lowell is capable of, but its naked honesty reveals the intensity of his familial history and his psychological state by giving readers the raw material that always seemed in his life to be “troubling the waters” (165).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Lowell writes “My Last Afternoon” as an adult remembering his childhood. The poem, however, includes the child’s sensibilities and perspectives by describing the world as he saw it at age five. Locate parts of the poem where Lowell switches or mixes the perspectives. How does he navigate to the consciousnesses to create a sense of irony in the poem? How does that irony relate to the poem’s overall tone? 2. An image of young Lowell playing in the dirt recurs several times throughout the poem. He writes in part 1, “One of my hands was cool on a pile / of black earth, the other warm / on a pile of lime,” setting the two substances apart as opposites (163). The fi nal lines in “My Last Afternoon” set the two values apart again and then say “Come winter, / Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color” (167). What might Lowell mean by “one color”? If we take the soil and lime as symbols of opposite value, what meaning might their blending hold for the other symbolic images in the poem? 3. In part 4 of “My Last Afternoon,” Lowell calls himself Agrippina, sister of the Roman emperor Caligula and mother of Nero. Apparently Lowell’s uncle read him stories about Nero’s kingdom. Agrippina, interestingly, had many elicit

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and taboo sexual relationships, including open participation in Caligula’s court, marriage to her uncle, and incestuous encounters with her son. Nero eventually banished her from the kingdom. What then does this metaphor about Lowell’s identity suggest about his childhood and his familial relationships?

“Skunk Hour” (1959) Perhaps Lowell’s best-known poem, “Skunk Hour” is the last poem in the seminal book Life Studies. At the end of a very personal book fi lled with informal diction, “Skunk Hour” leaves the reader with a description of the decaying New England town of Castine. The short lines, irregular rhymes, and careful use of sound and rhythm in “Skunk Hour” suggest an element of control that most of the poems in Life Studies lack. Also, the emphasis on imagery and description rather than autobiographic disclosure broadens the scope of the poem’s implications, removing it from a purely confessional context. Despite the limited authorial presence, however, “Skunk Hour” remains one of Lowell’s most personal and revealing poems. What exactly the poem reveals is, of course, subject to critical debate. The most significant point of contention falls on the fi nal image of the skunks waddling through town. In a letter to John Berryman, Lowell wrote that the skunks “are horrible blind energy.” Many people read them along those lines as the literal stench of a decomposing society. This interpretation figures the skunks as the remaining life source in a dead environment, scavenging for human waste. Others, however, see the skunks as a cheerful image. Rather than seeing a hopeless situation deteriorating to animal instincts, critics such as Charles Altieri and James E. B. Breslin argue that the skunks suggest an opportunity to refigure religious fanaticism as secular ritual. The reformation, while not completely freeing, does allow the poem’s speaker, presumably Lowell, to stand back at the end of the scene to “breathe the rich air” (192).

While differing on the fi nal implications of “Skunk Hour,” both sides of the debate acknowledge the general malaise of the poem’s initial observations. The heiress is in her dotage, buying up property and letting it fall apart. The summer millionaire auctioned off his yawl and left town. And the token gay decorator uses tools of the town’s once-prosperous industry as ornamentation. Despite the tone of understated humor, Lowell describes the collapse of a social structure. The critic Paul Breslin, however, points out that the severity of the problems wanes when compared to most other destitute populations in the country: “The sinister language of illness (‘the season’s ill’) and contamination (‘A red fox stain covers Blue Hill’) does not rest on a convincing portrayal of anything sinister in the environment; it is only intelligible as the projection of the poet’s internal sense of foreboding” (69). Although limited, the use of personal pronouns gives “Skunk Hour” its intimacy. When Lowell writes “My mind’s not right,” he conditions all of the previous observations as based upon his questionable perspective (191). In that sense, the social deterioration described in “Skunk Hour” dramatizes the tensions of Lowell’s psychological state. Within the context of a mind that quotes Satan from John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost (“I myself am hell”), we begin to see the extent of Lowell’s anxious relationship with the world.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Lowell dedicates “Skunk Hour” to his friend and fellow poet ELIZABETH BISHOP. Read Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo” and compare her use of the personal pronoun I to Lowell’s. How does the authorial presence differ in each of the poems? Also, consider the presence of animals at the end of each poem and how the authors related differently to those animals. 2. The fourth stanza of “Skunk Hour” introduces a gay character whom Lowell chooses to describe as “our fairy / decorator” who would rather marry than fi nd lucrative work. What does the character add to Lowell’s description of the traditional New England town? How does the dec-

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orator’s profession factor into the town’s general economic situation? And how does Lowell’s use of the word our position the decorator in relation to the rest of the town’s population? 3. Lowell ends “Skunk Hour” by stating that the mother skunk “will not scare” (192). Of what might the skunk be scared? What does its persistence determine about the skunks’ place within the town’s social structure?

“For the Union Dead” (1960) Asked to write a poem for the Boston Arts Festival, Lowell produced “For the Union Dead.” He read it at the festival in 1960 under the title “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusetts’ 54th,” included it in the fi rst paperback edition of Life Studies, and then changed the title to “For the Union Dead” before publishing it in the Atlantic Monthly in 1960 and collecting it in the 1964 book of the same title. As Lowell explained before reading it at the festival, the poem “is about childhood memories, the evisceration of our modern cities, civil rights, nuclear warfare and more particularly, Colonel Robert Shaw and his Negro regiment, the Massachusetts 54th” (Doreski 109). Through the image of “St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,” a monument memorializing the 54th infantry, Lowell works outward to touch on Boston’s social history in regard to its changing cultural values. Some historical context helps bring out the poem’s significant political implications. After President Abraham Lincoln decided in 1863 to admit black soldiers into the Union Army, the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry became the fi rst black regiment recruited in the North. Colonel Shaw, a white abolitionist from Boston, volunteered to command the unit. Under his leadership the 54th unsuccessfully attacked Fort Wagner in South Carolina. More than 250 of their soldiers died, including Shaw, but the North used the heroic story to encourage blacks to join Union forces. In 1897 Boston commemorated the event with a bronze basrelief monument by Augustus Saint-Gauden, which

included a quote from James Russell Lowell’s poem “Memoriae Positum R.G.S.” Although not always an outspoken critic of racism, Lowell did make public comments about the importance of resolving racial confl ict by ending systematic oppression. The epigraph to “For the Union Dead,” in fact, rewrites an inscription on the statue that translated means “he leaves all behind to protect the state.” Lowell’s version reads, “they leave. . . ,” thereby honoring the sacrifice each member of the infantry made. The poem itself does not serve as a corrective to the social ills Lowell points out but rather serves as an indictment. By describing Boston’s fallen monuments—the dilapidated aquarium, the girdled statehouse, the splinted Civil War statue—Lowell accuses his home city of failing to remember and honor its noble public history. Unlike much of his earlier poetry, “For the Union Dead” looks to the city’s Brahmin past as an ethical model for its future. “Their monument sticks like a fishbone / in the city’s throat,” reminding everyone that we must remember the causes for which the 54th Infantry fought and died. The scope of the poem reaches from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement, making the point that institutionalized racism still exists in America and in Boston. Lowell writes, “When I crouch to my television set, / the drained faces of Negro schoolchildren rise like balloons” (377). That image of rising balloons harks back to “the bubbles / drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish” in the second stanza and the “bell-cheeked Negro infantry” in the sixth stanza. Not only does it draw a correlation between the schoolchildren and the captive fish, but it implicates Lowell in the white racism of American culture as well, by showing the similarly voyeuristic relationship he has to both fish and civil rights activists. His self-awareness shows a realization that even as a critic he is caught up in the “savage servility” that he denounces (378).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Lowell’s mentor Allen Tate wrote “Ode to the Confederate Dead” in 1928. His agrarian poem presents the dilemma of a man standing

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at the gate of a Confederate graveyard. While he understands the impossibility of returning to the grandeur of a pre–Civil War South, he feels lost in the desolate present. Read both “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and “For the Union Dead” and discuss their similarities and differences. How does Lowell’s recontextualization of Tate’s theme produce new and different meanings? 2. In the epigraph Lowell makes a point of honoring all the men who served in the 54th Infantry. The poem proper, though, seems to give particular focus to Colonel Shaw himself, fleshing out the historical figure with descriptions of both his physical appearance and his character. What sort of historical realities might prevent Lowell from exploring the character of a specific black soldier? Does Lowell unduly glorify Shaw at the expense of the other soldiers by not addressing those realities? 3. The critic Paul Doherty points out a number of historical inaccuracies in “For the Union Dead.” For instance, he mentions that Lowell seems to attribute the use of the word niggers to Shaw’s father, when in fact, it was a Confederate officer who used the word to describe where Shaw was buried. Doherty, though, argues that Lowell achieves an ethical truth, even if specific facts mislead the reader. Do you think that an ethical truth is possible if an author does not take care to present information as accurately as possible? Outline what you understand the poem’s intent to be and formulate an argument to defend your position on the importance of historical accuracy in “For the Union Dead.” 4. In stanzas 14 and 15, Lowell mentions an advertisement for Mosler Safes that uses an image of Hiroshima. Apparently one of their safes survived the atomic explosion, a fact that Lowell does not believe justifies a commercial image of Hiroshima being bombed. Find an advertisement that somehow incorporates a political or historical event. What are the ad’s political implications? Citing specific examples from the poem, explain how the ad you found does or does not relate to Lowell’s critical depiction of a

society overrun by commercial incentive in “For the Union Dead.”

“Night Sweat” (1963) First published in the Encounter in 1963, then a second time in the Kenyon Review in 1964, “Night Sweat” was collected in Lowell’s 1964 book For the Union Dead, with slight revisions. After the drastic aesthetic changes that his poetry underwent in the 1950s, which culminated in the informal confessions of Life Studies, Lowell seems to have drifted back toward the traditionalism of his earlier writing without ever reverting to the careful hyperbole of Lord Weary’s Castle. Instead, For the Union Dead captures some of the drama of his early poems through the use of more idiomatic American diction. “Night Sweat” in particular demonstrates Lowell’s ability to rejuvenate old poetic forms with vibrant language. He divides the poem in two halves, each one a sonnet. We see in the fi rst half a nighttime scene that dramatizes the pain of living and writing. The author depicts himself in the throes of a nightmare, a panic attack, or an equally terrifying experience. The poem does not explicitly say what accosts the speaker, but the language used to describe the night sweat suggests despair and agitation. We learn that the experience recurs frequently: “for ten nights now I’ve felt the creeping damp” (375). The calm phrasing of the line—with its colloquial “now I’ve”—gives a sense of resignation, while the phrase “creeping damp” adds a frightening dimension to the poem’s tone. The second stanza moves from the dark of night into the light of day. Lowell writes, “I feel the light lighten my leaded eyelids” as he awakes into a world considerably less painful than the experience described in the fi rst stanza. Instead of living and writing alone, with the “bias of existing” wringing him dry, he encounters an Other. The “You!” of the fi rst line, we discover in the eighth, is his wife, whose “lightness alters everything” (375). We can infer that part of his misery in the fi rst half of the poem stems from the difficulties of marriage.

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The problems of the fi rst stanza regarding his inability to write outside himself arise again in the second. The poem ends with an act of supplication. He begs, “if I cannot clear / the surface of these troubled waters here, / absolve me, help me, Dear Heart” (375). Clearing the surface of troubled waters metaphorically addresses Lowell’s attempt to communicate with another person. In many of his poems on marriage we see only sadness. “Night Sweat,” with its dual sonnets, provides a balance unlike poems such as “Man and Wife” or “ ‘To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage.’ ” Rather than acquiescing to depression, he tries to understand it as a process of failed communication. In the end, though, he fails to accept responsibility, expecting, instead, that his wife will forgive him while also “bearing this world’s dead weight and cycle on [her] back” (375).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Lowell’s later book The Dolphin is composed completely of sonnets, many of which deal with his last two marriages. Pick any poem from the collection and discuss its use of form and content as compared to “Night Sweat.” Do the poems use the same form to address similar feelings? If not, why use the same form? 2. In 1961 Lowell praised a poem by Yves Winters called “The Marriage.” The line in “Night Sweat” that mentions the urn alludes to Winters’s poem. Read both and discuss the difference. How does Lowell recontextualize the urn image to make it his own?

“For Theodore Roethke” (1967) Originally collected in Near the Ocean, “For Theodore Roethke” also appeared in Lowell’s later book, History, under the title “Theodore Roethke 1908–63.” Although the two versions differ in significant ways, they remain closely related, not only through subject and general intent to honor a fellow poet, but also in the reuse of many of the same phrasings and images. The fi rst version consists of four unrhymed stanzas, each four lines

long. The second, like all the poems in History, is an unrhymed sonnet. Aside from the structure, the fi rst three lines of the second version present the most drastic change. Rather than opening with an account of the speaker’s psyche, it opens with a recollection of THEODORE ROETHKE’s time at Yaddo, an estate in Saratoga Springs, New York, that offers residencies to artists. Lowell writes directly to Roethke, “you shared a bathroom with a bag / tree-painter whose boobs bounced in the basin, / your blues basin where you wished to plunge your head. . . .” (ellipsis Lowell’s 533). By including the personal information about Roethke, whether accurate or not, Lowell explicitly introduces his fellow poet’s struggle with mental illness and depression. As did Lowell, Roethke suffered several bouts of severe mental instability, resulting in repeated hospitalization and psychiatric treatment. History deals at length with Lowell’s personal life, including his psychological struggles. Any reader who reads as far as “Theodore Roethke 1908–63” in the collection, or any reader who has even basic knowledge of Lowell’s biography, will grasp the personal connection that he draws between himself and Roethke. The similarities between the authors abound, and others have drawn similar connections before. They were close in age, dealt with similar issues in their lives, included many of those issues in their poetry, and struggled to fi nd a poetic form between the strict meter and rhyme of formalism and the looser forms of more contemporary free verse. Lowell wrote his homage to Roethke after Roethke’s premature death in 1963. Unexpectedly suffering a heart attack upon diving into a friend’s pool, he drowned. He was only 55 years old when he died and at the height of his powers as a poet. The suddenness of his death prompted a number of tributes, honoring the poet for his knowledge of and attention to nature, for his skill in using rhyme and meter, and for his skill in representing truths through the subjective nature of individual experience. Interestingly, Lowell’s tribute reads as not quite in praise of Roethke. Clearly Lowell respected Roethke, as the third stanza evidences: “The black stump of your hand / just touched the waters

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under the earth, / and left them quickened with your name . . .” (ellipsis Lowell’s 396). The second stanza, however, describes Roethke in less pleasant terms: “Sheeplike, unsociable reptilian.” Lowell, so often open about his own life’s inadequacies, does not romanticize Roethke’s. Instead, his tribute pays homage to the poet by addressing Roethke’s life as accurately as he can envision it.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Lowell wrote a number of poems named after poet friends of his for History. Read the poems on Allen Tate, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, or any of his other contemporaries. How does he treat them in comparison to Theodore Roethke? Do they seem to be friends, colleagues, historical figures, or all three? Why might Lowell take other literary figures so seriously when thinking about and practicing his own writing? 2. Read several Roethke poems from different periods in his career. Start with selections from his fi rst book, Open House (1941), followed by something from The Waking (1953), and, fi nally, read selections of his posthumously published The Far Field (1964). How does his style change over the course of his career? Do his aesthetic reconsiderations relate in any way to Lowell’s? 3. Read both versions of “For Theodore Roethke (1908–63).” Citing specific examples, make an argument for which has greater success in addressing the particularities of Roethke’s life. Which works better as a poem? Include in your argument a discussion of structure, line length, diction, and imagery.

“Near the Ocean” (1967) Published in 1967, Near the Ocean was written at the height of Lowell’s political activism. In 1965 he refused to attend the White House Festival of the Arts, to which President Lyndon B. Johnson had invited him. The public protest against U.S. involvement in Vietnam earned Lowell more attention than did most of his writing career. In the

wake of the publicity, he felt the need to write a more public form of poetry in order to address the issues he suddenly found himself discussing. To do that, Lowell returned to the formal metrical patterns and strict rhyme schemes of his early verse. The collection includes a number of loose translations of Horace, Juvenal, and Dante, along with several original poems. The most politically relevant of those poems are contained within the opening series of five poems, titled Near the Ocean, the last of which is also titled, “Near the Ocean.” The fi rst poem, “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” opens with an existentialist lament for the order and beauty of pastoral poetry, which, in the past, captured the image of a simpler, freer world. Lowell read existentialist philosophers such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and openly discussed them in terms of early poems such as “Skunk Hour.” In the fi rst stanza of “Waking Early Sunday Morning” Lowell dramatizes one of existentialism’s central tenets, that existence is absurd. The fi rst lines seem to praise the idea of liberty: “O to break loose, like the chinook / salmon jumping and falling back.” By the end of the stanza, however, the salmon becomes a symbol of futility: Its pointless task of swimming upstream to seek freedom only culminates in arriving “alive enough to spawn and die” (383). That opening passage colors the shifting tones of each poem in the series. Lowell goes through his usual gamut of criticisms, starting with religion; then moving on to American militarism, politics, contemporary culture, social confl ict; and fi nally ending with his deeply affected views on marriage. Unlike in many of his early poems and criticisms, however, Lowell makes very specific attacks on the different institutions he writes about, rather than depending heavily on allusion and metaphor. For example, the fourth poem, “Central Park,” uses two different cat images to address poverty in America by describing the “deserter’s rich / Welfare lying out of reach” (392). His general discontent culminates in “Near the Ocean,” a poem he dedicated to his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick.

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Lowell considered “Near the Ocean” to be the most ambitious of the series. It is also the least public, as it offers, according to Lowell, “a nightmarish, obscure reverie on marriage, both vengeful and apologetic” (Mariani 336). Lowell also cited Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Dover Beach” as a model for his poem. While the association may serve to aggrandize his intent, it also suggests that, as Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” “Near the Ocean” deals with a crisis of faith. With allusions to Medusa’s beheading along with the pained language of betrayals, abortions, and hard-veined elms, it certainly does not constitute the typical marriage poem. As the rest of the opening series to Near the Ocean does, the last poem laments the loss of order in our world and its result—the difficulty of forming meaningful relationships.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The Near the Ocean series incorporates a selfaware understanding of Lowell’s changes in perspective. In “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” for instance, he writes about his own shifting moods in relation to observations: I watch a glass of water wet with a fi ne fuzz of icy sweat, silvery colors touched with sky, serene in their neutrality— yet if I shift, or change my mood, I see some object made of wood, background behind it of brown grain, to darken, but not to stain. (384)

Here Lowell plays with the idea of figure ground, the ability to distinguish between foreground and background based on contrast. A shifting perspective, as illustrated by the preceding passage, will completely alter the image and focus of one’s observations. Consider the idea of shifting perspectives in terms of “Near the Ocean.” How does the passage describe the poem’s shifts in attitudes and attentions? 2. “Central Park” and William Carlos Williams’s poem “Sunday in the Park” both make observations about park life that delve past the leisurely

activity into thoughts about economic and social relationships. However, although they are similar in some ways, the poems are structured according to radically different poetic sensibilities. Read both and discuss how each uses structure to accomplish different things. Where do the poems’ meanings intersect, despite the structural differences?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON LOWELL AND HIS WORK 1. Confessional poetry emerged in the 1950s as a form of writing that freed writers from the formalism of a New Critical approach and the impersonality characteristic of modernism. The highly personal genre of poetry often includes authors who present their inner thoughts and private life with explicit candor, detailing psychological struggles, sexual ambivalences, and autobiographic traumas. Although Lowell did not accept the label as an adequate categorization of his poetry, Life Studies is commonly cited as the fi rst collection of confessional verse. Other authors categorized under the label include Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and sometimes Allen Ginsberg. Choose from among the works of these poets and discuss the similarities and differences you discover. Do you think the term confessional adequately describes the poetry? Why or why not? Be specific in citing examples from the primary texts. 2. In his book Dolphin, Lowell included several verbatim passages of letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. He created a minor controversy by violating her privacy, and several of his poet friends denounced the practice as contemptible and dishonest. Among his critics, Adrienne Rich went so far as to call the book cruel. Although not herself among poets commonly considered confessional, Rich does include considerable amounts of her private life within the lines of her poetry. Read Lowell’s Dolphin and the section of Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language entitled “Twenty-one

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Love Poems.” Compare and contrast the ways in which each poet uses personal information about a lover as material for poetry. Do you think Rich is discreet enough to justify her criticisms of Lowell? 3. Lowell worked on a number of translations during his career as a poet. Often he published them alongside his own poetry. In his collection Imitations, however, he focuses on translations. The introduction explains that he has “been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone. Most often this has been a tone, for the tone is something that will always more or less escape transference to another language and cultural moment” (195). As Lowell, many poets do not believe in the possibility of a literal translation. He takes it further, though, arguing that neither literal meaning nor similar tone can be achieved when transferring poems between languages and cultures. Choose several of the poems in Imitations. Read both Lowell’s translation and another poet’s translation, then discuss the differences. Do you think Lowell is correct in his attitudes toward translating poetry? 4. Sylvia Plath, one of Lowell’s students, became as controversial a literary figure as Lowell himself. Interestingly, they both suffered traumatic experiences with their fathers, which each later incorporated in poems. Plath’s father died when she was young, while Lowell and his father had a falling out. Read Plath’s well-known poem “Daddy” (from the 1965 collection Ariel) and Lowell’s poems “Rebellion” and “Father,” then compare the different functions of the father role in each writer’s poetry. How do representations of gender figure into the different depictions of their respective fathers? 5. Read T. S. Eliot’s essay titled “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920). Eliot attempts to argue for a theoretical framework within which we might understand our canon and what deserves to be part of it. He discusses individual talent in terms of one’s historical position and the ability to engage the tradition from within which one writes. Lowell, of

course, was obsessed with his relationship to tradition and his position within history. He does not, however, conform to all of Eliot’s standards for writing credible poetry. Read “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and discuss the ways in which Lowell does and does not ascribe to its tenets. A full-text version of the essay is available online: http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html. WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Altieri, Charles. “Poetry in a Prose World: Robert Lowell’s ‘Life Studies.’ ” In Modern Poetry Studies, edited by Jerome Mazzaro. Columbus, Ohio: C. E. Merrill, 1971. ———. “Robert Lowell and the Difficulties of Escaping Modernism.” In Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979. Axelrod, Steven Gould. Robert Lowell: Life and Art. Princeton, N.J.: University of Princeton Press, 1978. Bedford, William. “The Morality of Form in the Poetry of Robert Lowell.” Ariel 9, no. 1 (January 1978): 3–17. Bell, Vereen M. Robert Lowell: Nihilist as Hero. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1983. Breslin, James E. B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry 1945–1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, 137–139. Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 68–70. Doherty, Paul. “The Poet as Historian: ‘For the Union Dead’ by Robert Lowell.” Concerning Poetry 1, no. 2 (Fall 1968): 37–41. Doreski, William. Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999. Edwards, Jonathan. “Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 1.” Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Available online. URL: http://www.ccel.org/ ccel/edwards/works1.i.xxiv.html. Accessed March 12, 2007. Fein, Richard J. Robert Lowell. Boston: Twayne, 1970.

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“The Festival Guest Here Beat His Breast.” Time, 11 June 1965, 29. Ford, Karen, and Cary Nelson. “Sylvia Plath (1932– 1963).” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/ maps/poets/m_r/plath/plath.htm. Accessed March 12, 2007. Jenks, Philip. “On the Poetics of Possibility in Robert Lowell.” Available online. URL: http://www. culturalsociety.org/lowell.htm. Accessed March 12, 2007. Kalstone, David. “Robert Lowell: The Uses of History.” In Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, 41–76. Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. ———. Collected Prose. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. Mariani, Paul. Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. Munk, Linda. “Mr. Edwards, Mr. Lowell, and the Spider.” University of Toronto Quarterly 68, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 790–795. Available online. URL: http://www.utpjournals.com/product/ utq/683/683_review_munk.html. Accessed March 12, 2007.

Nelson, Cary, and Walter Kalaidijan. “Theodore Roethke (1908–1963).” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc. edu/maps/poets/m_r/roethke/roethke.htm. Accessed March 12, 2007. Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Thurston, Michael. “Robert Lowell (1917–1977).” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ lowell/lowell.htm. March 12, 2007. ———. “Robert Lowell’s Monumental Vision: History, Poetic Form, and the Cultural Work of Postwar Lyric.” American Literary History (Spring 2000): 79–112. Travisano, Thomas. Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Makeup of a Postmodern Aesthetic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Vendler, Helen. The Given and the Made: Strategies of Poetic Redefinition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Wallingford, Katharine. “Robert Lowell and Free Association.” Mosaic 19, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 121–132. Wiebe, Dallas E. “Mr. Lowell and Mr. Edwards.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature. Poetry Explication Issue 3, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1962): 21–31. Williamson, Alan. Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.

David Squires

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) Art, in essence, celebrates life and gives us our measure. (interview with Daniel Stern)

A

mong the most important American fiction writers of the second half of the 20th century, Bernard Malamud distinguished himself as both a novelist and short story writer. Though he did not write exclusively about the Jewish experience, he is considered one of the foremost Jewish novelists of his time, often viewed alongside SAUL BELLOW and P HILIP ROTH. As many of his fictional characters are, Bernard Malamud was a child of immigrant Jews. His father, Max (or Mendel), and his mother, Bertha (whose maiden name, Fidelman, he would later assign to one of his best-known characters), were both Russian-born, immigrating to the United States in the early part of the 20th century. They married, settled in Brooklyn, and made a precarious living running a grocery store. Bernard was born in 1914. He attended public grammar school and then went on to Erasmus High School, one of New York’s best public high schools, yet he described his home as modest: “There were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall” (Stern 43). When Bernard was ill as a child, his father bought 20 volumes of The Book of Knowledge, and he had access to the radio and the Yiddish theater. Already he had contributed short stories to the Erasmus High literary magazine, and even in grammar school, Malamud stated, “I lived in a state of selfenhancing discovery. I turned school assignments into stories” (“Reflections” 15). After high school

he enrolled at the City College of New York, where he received a B.A. in 1936. His formal education was completed by an M.A. in literature awarded by Columbia University in 1942. Malamud had already begun to face the need to earn his living, while still striving to become a writer. His mother had died, his father was poor, and the young man felt unwilling to rely on him for support. Thus, he began teaching, fi rst, at Lafayette High School, then—after a move to Washington, D.C., where he worked at an undemanding and well-remunerated job as a Census Bureau clerk and (as Walt Whitman had) wrote his own work at his government desk—again in New York, teaching in Brooklyn at night, then for a year in Harlem. In 1949 he accepted an offer to teach English at Oregon State College, in Corvallis; he was surprised to learn on arrival that it was a land-grant college, and his lack of a Ph.D. kept him teaching exclusively composition for years. Though his time at Corvallis obviously supplies some of the inspiration for his 1961 novel A New Life, readers who identify him too closely with the miserable S. Levin of that novel overlook the 12 years Malamud spent in Oregon (Levin flees at the end of a year) and the books and stories he was able to write and publish in those years, including The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), and A New Life (1961); moreover, his fi rst book of short fiction, The Magic Barrel, including some stories he had been writing since the 1940s,

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appeared in 1958 and won the National Book Award in 1959. With The Assistant, Malamud had turned to what would become his acknowledged subject, the lives of Jews. “I thought of him”—his father, who had mourned Bernard’s marriage to a gentile but later softened—“as I began The Assistant and felt I would often be writing about Jews, in celebration and expiation, though perhaps that was having it both ways” (Stories ix). The Assistant does indeed attend to the poverty and suffering many Jewish immigrants experienced The title refers to Frank Alpine, the assistant to a Jewish grocer, Morris Bober, whose life may reflect some of the realities of Max Malamud’s life as a hardpressed grocer. The plot includes Jewish-gentile conflict, crime, violence, surprising redemption, and an ambiguous ending. A New Life is Malamud’s contribution to the flourishing college novel genre. It places an eastern Jew of radical opinions, S. Levin, in an alien setting, the English Department of Cascadia College, which has sometimes been seen as a sinister burlesque of Oregon State. Levin’s humanistic aspirations are thwarted by the mechanistic and deadening ideas about teaching that constrain him. Likewise, his erotic life, including an ultimately disastrous affair with a student, is a continuing arena of strife. Though he ends by seducing the wife of his chief academic tormentor, it is hardly a happy conclusion, since he is not entirely sure he wants her and the cost of his “success” is the loss of his teaching career. As his reputation grew, the English Department relieved him from exclusive assignment to composition and permitted him to teach some literature classes. In 1961 the Malamuds (the family now included his wife, the former Ann de Chiara, and children Paul and Janna) returned to the East, where Bernard was appointed to the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont; the appointment continued until his death in 1986. At Bennington, he said, his teachers were his colleagues Howard Nemerov, the poet; Stanley Edgar Hyman, a leading critic; and the poet Ben Belitt, along with his “other teachers . . . my students, whom I taught to teach me” (“Reflections” 18). He taught courses in imagina-

tive writing, despite his doubts about their value. He explained, “Talent is always in short supply, although I had a handful of good writing students whom I enjoyed teaching and learning from. In essence one doesn’t teach writing; he encourages talented people whom he may be able to do something for. I feel that writing courses are of limited value although they do induce some students to read fiction with care” (Stories xi). On the other hand, Malamud noted that teaching never interfered with his writing. During the Bennington years, Malamud published four additional novels: The Fixer (1966), The Tenants (1971), Dubin’s Lives (1979), and God’s Grace (1982). Set in czarist Russia, The Fixer is a more straightforward look at anti-Semitism than Malamud had presented in his earlier fictions and, as Joel Salzberg emphasizes, a more politicized book than its predecessors. His protagonist, Yakov Bok, suffers a series of torments, including, at one point, a version of the blood libel, the historic accusation of Jews as child killers. The Fixer won Malamud his second National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and for many critics is his greatest achievement; in a 1966 interview Malamud said that he considered it his strongest book thus far. As was always his practice, he alternated between publishing novels and short stories, which appeared in the collections Idiots First (1963), Rembrandt’s Hat (1973), and The Stories of Bernard Malamud, with his introduction (1983). Other collections appeared after his death. Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969), though its chapters had been published separately as stories, has a novelesque unity in being composed of scenes in the life, artistic and erotic, of Arthur Fidelman, a painter and schlemiel. The Tenants juxtaposes a Jewish writer, Harry Lesser, with an African-American writer, Willie Spearmint. They are the only tenants of a slum, and their rivalry includes differing ideas about writing, competition over a woman, growing political tensions along the black-Jewish fault line, and eventually horrific violence. As in a number of his short stories, here Malamud reflects his own urban experience and his time teaching in Harlem, exploring issues divid-

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ing blacks and Jews, both historical victims of racism, without offering any easy answers. Malamud received a number of honors for his work. In 1972 he was appointed to a three-year term as honorary consultant in American letters to the Library of Congress. He won an O. Henry Memorial Award for his story “Man in the Drawer,” and a Notable Book citation from the American Library Association for Dubin’s Lives. In the early 1980s he received Brandeis University’s Creative Arts Award in fiction, a Gold Medal for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for fiction, the Mondello Prize from Italy, and an honorary degree from his alma mater, City College of the City University of New York. Several grants assisted his work, perhaps the most important being a Partisan Review– Rockefeller Foundation Grant that coincided with a sabbatical from Oregon State in 1956 and permitted a stay in Italy. He wrote stories including “The Magic Barrel” in Rome, and the Italian experience both contributed to later fiction and gave him a fresh approach when he returned to Corvallis. Toward the end of his life, as he grew increasingly celebrated for his life’s work, Malamud’s new fiction met with a less positive critical response. When Dubin’s Lives appeared in 1979, reviews were very mixed. This account of a writer (the biographer William Dubin) and his affair with a much younger woman was uneasily tagged as possible selfrevelation or self-projection, and Janna Malamud Smith’s biography of her father correlates it with an affair between Malamud and a student at Bennington in the early 1960s, a relationship renewed while he was writing Dubin’s Lives. God’s Grace (1982) is unlike any of his other novels, a fable of a world swept by nuclear war and depopulated by another flood sent by a disappointed God. Calvin Cohn, however, has survived underwater at the time of the catastrophe, and he forms a postapocalyptic community with three apes on an island. With two chimpanzees and a gorilla he tries to remake a humane life, and with one of them, Mary Madelyn, he fathers a daughter. Perhaps because it differs so noticeably from his usual fictional approach (though Malamud has never shied away from fantasy, and

elements of allegory are present as far back as The Natural), perhaps because of weakness in Malamud’s realization of his ambitious idea, it puzzled and disappointed many reviewers. Some deplored the “chimp humor”; others admired the audacity of the fable, taking in as it does Jewish-Christian relations, a new Robinson Crusoe, U.S.-Soviet politics, and a new fall. At the time of his death Malamud had completed about three-quarters of a novel called “The People,” in which a Russian Jew has adventures in the 19th-century American West. It was published in its unfi nished state in 1989, as part of The People, and Uncollected Stories. Bernard Malamud was, in important ways, a pure artist. His life was mostly a private one, despite his awards and his work with American PEN, of which he was president from 1979 to 1981. He taught, but his idea of the writer’s life was of devotion to the craft. He mostly avoided publicity and was seldom quoted on matters of public controversy. His relatively quiet life and dedication to the artistic vocation help explain his lowered visibility in the decades since his death. For some years there was no authorized biography, owing partly to the objections of his survivors, led by his daughter Janna. She later reversed her position and wrote a book of her own, My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud (2006), a sort of joint memoir of her and her father. She acknowledges her father’s “complex sense of privacy” (ix). This sense of privacy probably stems from Malamud’s conviction that the work is what matters most. In 1984 he explained his calling, in part, by saying: In writing I had to say what had happened to me, yet present it as though it had been magically revealed. I began to write seriously when I had taught myself the discipline necessary to achieve what I wanted. When I touched that time, my words announced themselves to me. I have given my life to writing without regret, except when I consider what in my work I might have done better. I wanted my writing to be as good as it must be, and on the whole I think it is. (“Reflections” 18)

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“The First Seven Years” (1950) Jewish subject matter occupies one of Malamud’s fi rst stories to be published in a major journal, the Partisan Review. The author told Daniel Stern, “Like many writers I’m influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father’s and mother’s generations; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers” (56). “The First Seven Years” refers to the Genesis story of Jacob and Rachel; to win Rachel as his wife, Jacob promises to work for her father, Laban, for seven years. The characters are the immigrant Jews of the Pale and their American-born offspring. The story is told from the point of view of Feld, the shoemaker, a Polish Jew who has done relatively well in his shop. Though he is slow to realize it, his success is largely due to the skill and hard work of his assistant, Sobel, an unprepossessing Polish refugee he has hired and taught the cobbler’s business. Sobel is by now so good at it that Feld need not work hard; he can lie in bed in the morning, because he trusts Sobel to do the work, to open and close. Though Feld knows that Sobel deserves to earn more for his hard work and has sometimes offered him a raise, he thinks of him with some contempt. Sobel, after all, is a penniless 35-year-old, homely, bald, with no prospects—not so different, perhaps, from Feld at one point, but having made good, the shoemaker now looks down on Sobel. Feld also aspires for a social rise for his daughter, Miriam. Miriam is a bit of a puzzle; 19, pretty (at least by her father’s account), intelligent, and bookish, she has shown no interest in college and gone to work in order to be independent. Still, Feld would like to see her with a man of distinction, and he has selected Max, the son of a peddler who is a college student, making something of himself, and thus his idea of a good match for Miriam. His matchmaking efforts provoke Sobel, listening in the background, to a fury of hammering that Feld cannot understand, ending in his smashing his last and walking out. “The First Seven Years” is rich in ironies. The reader will be aware, long before Feld realizes any-

thing, that Sobel is in love with Miriam. He has been her adviser, lending her books and discussing ideas, for years. Miriam provides the clearest explanation for her father’s blindness; commenting on her boredom with Max, whom she has dated twice, she says: “He’s nothing more than a materialist.” “What means this word?” “He has no soul. He’s only interested in things.” (21)

That Feld himself is equally materialist helps explain his attraction to Max and his indifference to Sobel. He banks on Max’s college attendance, though a bit chagrined to find that he is studying accountancy, not medicine or law; he discounts Sobel’s reading and thinking, ignoring the fact that he is clearly an intellectual with a soul. The narrator tells us that Feld once asked Sobel why he read so much: “He read, he said, to know. But to know what, the shoemaker demanded, and to know, why? Sobel never explained, which proved he read so much because he was queer” (22–23). And, as he brutally tells Sobel when they finally discuss Miriam, “Sobel, you are crazy. . . . She will never marry a man so old and ugly like you” (24). This comment (though Feld grudgingly takes back ugly) precipitates the denouement, in which the shoemaker sadly accepts the love between his daughter and the refugee, as well as the fact that his ambitions for her life to be better materially than that of her parents have failed. Whether Feld’s yielding to Sobel is motivated by his need for him in the business (his inability to get along without him is what has led him to visit Sobel) or by his sudden pity for him is difficult to say. There is some insight into the life of the assistant, whose behavior up to this point has been either of no interest or just “queer.” As Sobel bitterly cries, “Why do you think I worked so long for you?” Sobel cried out. “For the stingy wages I sacrificed five years of my life so you could have to eat and drink and where to sleep?” “Then for what?” shouted the shoemaker. “For Miriam,” he blurted—“for her.”

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The shoemaker, after a time, managed to say, “I pay wages in cash, Sobel,” and lapsed into silence. (23)

When Feld insists that Sobel wait two more years before asking for Miriam’s hand and the next morning walks in to find his assistant “pounding leather for love” (25), the biblical allusion to the LabanJacob relationship is clear. In his introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud, the author writes, “I love the pleasures of the short story. One of them is the fast payoff. . . . Somewhere I’ve said that a short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime. . . . In a few pages a good story portrays the complexity of a life while producing the surprise and effect of knowledge—not a bad payoff” (xii). “The First Seven Years” is a good illustration of these strengths. It is 12 pages long; within it lies a searching examination of what has been called “the American dream”—a dream that, based as it is on the idea of “making it” and “self-improvement,” often is what Miriam would call materialistic. And yet, it is natural for a father to want a better life for his daughter. The question is: What is “better?” The reader is granted insight into the gradations of immigrant Jewry, as Feld simultaneously disdains Sobel the Polish refugee and sympathizes with his narrow escape from Adolf Hitler. (His question whether Sobel ever went to college indicates a bland ignorance of conditions beyond the Pale, however.) Despite the father’s disappointment, the story does deliver a payoff of promising love between two people who value what is important and have found it in each other. And yet—the first seven years? In the Bible, Jacob’s first seven years ended only with his betrayal and marriage to Rachel’s sister, after which he had to work another seven years to win Rachel. The “lifetime” that this story predicates is more troubling than it may appear.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Is Max indeed a “materialist” in the sense Miriam means? Or, is she finding reasons to reject her father’s candidate for her hand in favor of her own preference?

2. Think of other American texts that focus on the idea of the social rise—through hard work, luck, fortunate marriage, or whatever—that is sometimes thought of as “the American dream,” such as LORRAINE H ANSBERRY’s A Raisin in the Sun and A RTHUR MILLER’s Death of a Salesman. With these two works and their protagonists in mind, argue what constitutes the American dream, what its dangers are, and whether the protagonists in these works are responsible for the ideals they choose to follow. Are they as individuals to blame, or does society bear responsibility for their downfall? 3. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is about American success and about working to succeed for a beloved woman. Is Feld, on a much smaller scale, a Gatsbyesque figure? Defend your answer to this question in a well-formulated essay that compares the two works, using quotations and textual references to support your statements. 4. There is a proverb, emphasizing persistence, about a cobbler sticking to his last. (A last is the form on which a cobbler shapes shoes.) Does this have relevance to Sobel’s behavior? How about when he smashes the last after hearing Feld’s recruitment of Max for his daughter?

The Natural (1952) Malamud published seven novels. Considering his ongoing concern with the lives of American Jews, his first novel is his most anomalous. It has nothing to do with Jewish life, immigrants, and the complexities of relations among ethnic groups in urban America. Yet, The Natural is probably the best known of his books, certainly today the best selling of his novels, though the explanation has much to do with its 1984 incarnation as a film starring Robert Redford, a version in which much of what made Malamud’s book powerful was filtered out and its ending almost reversed. Malamud’s own professorial appearance and his stories of students and schlemiels may make his interest in baseball, the subject of The Natural, seem odd, but his childhood in Brooklyn prepared him for it;

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as he told Daniel Stern, “As a kid, for entertainment I turned to the movies and dime novels. Maybe The Natural derives from Frank Merriwell”—a Yaleeducated hero of virtuous endeavor and crime detection as well as baseball, football, and other sports, much loved in magazine and dime novel form by American boys—“as well as the adventures of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Ebbets Field” (43). In The Natural he created a rich plot that contained elements of a Frank Merriwell–type figure, Roy Hobbs, who lacks Frank’s fi rmness and comes to grief through cruel fate and his own weaknesses, a life similar to Babe Ruth’s, seriocomic fantastic events reminiscent of the American tall-tale tradition, and a mythic substrate indebted to Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. The central story is of a hero brought low by human weaknesses, including overweening ambition and misplaced love. Roy Hobbs first appears, a naive young ballplayer, on a train headed for the big city, accompanied by his mentor, Sam Simpson, an aging baseball scout who has discovered Roy, whose enormous skills promise some redemption for his futile life. At a stop along the way Whammer Wambold, the reigning home-run king, shows off for a mysterious girl called Harriet Bird, and Roy, stung by insults to Sam, strikes him out on three straight pitches. This proves disastrous not only because his third pitch wounds Sam fatally but also because he turns Harriet Bird’s attentions from the Whammer to him; she, a sort of Fury who shoots outstanding athletes, having induced Roy to state that he will be the best ever, shoots him in a Chicago hotel. This is the overture to the novel. When Roy appears again, he is a worn version of his youthful self, almost too old to be a player, who joins the dreadful New York Knights. Denied a chance to play by the petulant manager, he finally gets into a game and wins it by literally knocking the cover off the ball. He becomes a hero for the Knights, particularly after Bump Bailey, their previous star, stung by his rivalry, kills himself. Roy falls in love with Bump’s girl, Memo Paris, though she is clearly trouble; after a brief affair with a clearly good woman, Iris Lemon, he rejects her for the faithless and treacherous Memo.

Roy is surrounded by a nefarious crew including Memo; Max Mercy, an interfering sportswriter who was on the train the day he struck out the Whammer; and Judge Banner, the sinister owner of the Knights. His appetites for success, for Memo, for money, for everything at once, get him into trouble, as he gambles recklessly and eats obsessively, eventually winding up in the hospital with abdominal damage. Lured on by Memo, he accepts a bribe to throw the crucial game, and though he changes his mind, he fails and is disgraced nonetheless, his career at an end, his life a failure. As the novel ends, a small boy asks him, “Say it ain’t true, Roy”—echoing the “Say it ain’t so, Joe” associated with the disgraced White Sox gambler Shoeless Joe Jackson. The Natural is, in one way, about the destruction of innocence. The Roy of the beginning is almost unbelievably provincial. Though without arrogance, he is also without guile, and his ready admission that he will be the best ever invokes his punishment from Harriet Bird. Even years later he is still a relative innocent, unable to understand (for instance) Memo Paris’s complexity and unreliability. The worst are full of passionate intensity, and Roy is no match for them. There is an archetypal athlete’s story here, too, that of the unsophisticated man who gets too much too soon and is undone by a goddess figure. Kevin Baker invokes other baseball lives: Pistol Pete Reiser, a Dodger who (like Bump Bailey) ran into walls, though not fatally; Eddie Waitkus, also shot by a woman in a hotel room; and Babe Ruth, whose overeating produced a bellyache that affected the outcome of a game (xi). In his dislike for the press and the fans Roy follows Ted Williams. He becomes unpleasant with success and, one might argue, displays hubris that predicts if not ensures his downfall. The most interesting feature of the novel is not its use of familiar baseball topoi but its mythic underpinnings, which have been much discussed. They include magic, from Roy’s superhuman feats at the park to an unexplained moment in a nightclub where he pulls silver dollars from a bookie’s nose, a herring from Max Mercy’s mouth, and a bunny from Memo’s purse. The language and detail of the novel

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insist on the mythic background. For instance, the opposing pitcher looking in “saw Roy, in full armor, mounted on a black charger” (225). There are important thematic details, from Roy’s royal name, to his joining the Knights, to the name of their manager, Pop Kingfisher (i.e., Fisher King), and Roy’s success in healing the wounded Pop, resurrecting the dying Knights, and bringing rain to a wasteland (his first hit produces a three-day downpour), to his descent into the underworld, the gambling den staffed with masked devils. He has a miraculous weapon, Wonderboy, a bat he made for himself from a lightningstruck tree; with it, he is invincible, but as his powers fail, “Wonderboy resembled a sagging baloney” (140), and the end is near when Wonderboy splits during the climactic game, before Roy (like Mighty Casey) strikes out. This patterning of a baseball story on the Holy Grail legend might mean only that Malamud sees heroes in both realms. Iris Lemon, whose name and nature leave her somewhat outside the Grail story, tells Roy that she hates to see a hero fail and that “it’s their function to be the best and for the rest of us to understand what they represent and guide ourselves accordingly” (148). Roy obtusely misunderstands her notion of heroism as being about breaking records, just as he crudely misunderstands Iris in other ways. When asked why he employed the mythology in The Natural, Malamud responded: Because baseball flat is baseball flat. I had to do something else to enrich the subject. I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish. The mythological analogy is a system of metaphor. It enriches the vision without resorting to montage. This guy gets up with his baseball bat and all at once he is, through the ages, a knight—somewhat battered—with a lance; not to mention a guy with a blackjack, or someone attempting murder with a flower. You relate to the past and predict the future. I’m not talented as a conceptual thinker but I am in the uses of metaphor. The mythological and symbolic excite my imagination. (Stern 52)

Through metaphor and myth Malamud’s baseball novel can appeal to readers for whom sports are trivial and make Roy Hobbs—who is, after all, a limited man, coarse, uneducated, brutal, thoughtless, given to bad decisions, cruel to the woman who loves him and abject to the one who hates him, whom Fortune has made the best pitcher and, later, the best hitter in the world—a hero like Percival or Roland, and his failure to get a hit in a baseball game a tragedy.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Do you consider The Natural tragic? That is, does Roy Hobbs’s downfall have the kind of significance appropriate to that genre? Is he a satisfactory tragic hero? 2. Are the female characters credible to you, or is it the case that they function schematically—femme fatale, avenging Fury, redeeming angel, and so on? Which of them seems most convincingly developed? 3. The Natural mixes mythological matter with naturalistic detail. How important is the baseball information? Would the novel be accessible to a reader who knew, or cared, nothing about baseball? 4. What are some of the meanings of natural that could illuminate Malamud’s choice of title? 5. Consider other modern novels founded on baseball—Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly, W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant—and ponder why baseball, rather than football or Nascar racing or the NBA, is the literary subject par excellence in the United States. 6. F. Scott Fitzgerald declared that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Does that claim (whether you think it is true or not) illuminate Roy Hobbs’s quest after his first disaster and its outcome? 7. Must greatness in one dimension be purchased by deficiency somewhere else? Consider Roy Hobbs’s intellectual mediocrity, his indefatigable pursuit of the wrong woman, and his cruelty to Iris Lemon. Are these the price of unequaled baseball

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skill? How does the flawed hero of The Natural compare with, say, Achilles in The Iliad or Sir Lancelot?

“The Magic Barrel” (1954) Marriage, in its accomplished state or in prospect, is important subject matter in “The Jewbird,” “The First Seven Years,” and “Black Is My Favorite Color.” It is also at the heart of Malamud’s best-known short story, “The Magic Barrel,” which, though not as fantastic as “The Jewbird,” also touches on the supernatural. Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student, resolves to take a wife—not because he needs love or feels passion, but because he believes it will help him with his future congregation. Knowing no women, he employs a marriage broker, the plausible, slightly fishy Salzman, but Salzman’s efforts, despite his powerful salesmanship, do not bear fruit. Of his hyped prospects, one, Lily Hirschorn, interests Finkle enough to arrange a meeting; she is described by Salzman as “this fi ne girl that she speaks four languages and has personally in the bank ten thousand dollars? Also her father guarantees further twelve thousand. Also she has a new car, wonderful clothes, talks on all subjects, and she will give you a fi rst-class home and children. How near do we come in our life to paradise?” (132). Salzman has suavely lowered her acknowledged age from the original 32 to 29, but Finkle later judges her as past 35. His conversation with her, though it is hopeless for fi nding a mate, leads to a surprising acknowledgment: Asked when he became “enamored of God,” he admits that he “came to God not because I loved him but because I did not” (134). This epiphany leads to another, even starker realization when Finkle admits that he had never loved anyone but his parents, and “his whole life stood starkly revealed and he saw himself for the fi rst time as he really was—unloved and loveless” (135). This realization—which the narrator rather oddly says was bitter but not unexpected—changes Finkle’s ideas about women and love, leading him to decide that he no longer wants an arranged marriage but

prefers to love someone first, then marry. When Salzman leaves him a selection of photographs, he finds them all disappointing but for one, included by mistake supposedly, that “gave him the impression of youth—spring flowers, yet age—a sense of having been used to the bone, wasted; this came from the eyes, which were hauntingly familiar, yet absolutely strange” (138–139). The more he stares at this photograph, which seems obscurely evil and inspires both fear and fascination, the more he loves the woman in it. He finds Salzman in the Bronx and extorts from him the admission that the picture is of his disgraced daughter, Stella, who is described as wild, not the wife for a rabbi—apparently a prostitute. Finkle insists on meeting her, and as the story ends, he sees her standing on a corner smoking and wearing “white with red shoes, which fitted his expectations”; Finkle “ran forward with flowers outthrust,” while nearby, hidden, Salzman “chanted prayers for the dead” (143). The title of the story reflects Salzman’s claim that he has so many female clients he has to keep their details in a barrel. The barrel does not exist, but there is a touch of magic about the marriage broker, whose office, his wife tells Finkle, is in the air; when Finkle returns home after failing to find him, Salzman is mysteriously already waiting for him there. “The Magic Barrel” invites a number of different interpretations. One is that it is a trickster fable, in which the shrewd Salzman manipulates the unworldly Finkle into marrying his damagedgoods daughter, pretending to be horrified by the idea but somehow arranging for the photograph that so bewitches the rabbinical student to appear in his fishy-smelling briefcase. Even Finkle, having insisted on meeting Stella, leaves “affl icted by a tormenting suspicion that Salzman had planned it all to happen this way” (143). But has Finkle been tricked, betrayed? Perhaps it is the opposite. Perhaps the desiccated, fi nicky, loveless, and almost antilife student has been saved, and Pinye Salzman is his redeemer. Despite his brief suspicion, Finkle is faced with real life and a possibility of love (for once in his life), as the story ends, and if Stella is his salvation, then Salzman is the agent of that salvation. Interpretations of Salzman,

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summarized by Gary Sloan, make him “an insoluble mixture of the preternatural and the prosaic, ethereal mentor and plebeian hustler,” a shaman, the god Pan, a “scheming pimp,” a prophet, and nearly everything in between (51). Sloan leans toward the view of Salzman as tricky procurer, manipulating Finkle from the beginning toward a union with his daughter, who, he suggests, may be no more a prostitute than Finkle is a clergyman (the narrator says that she waits for him “uneasily and shyly,” her eyes “fi lled with desperate innocence” [143]). In stark contradiction, Stephen Bluestone identifies Salzman as God—initially just a “matchmakerGod,” but in his conclusion insisting that “God, as parent and matchmaker, is left at the end to justify to himself the painful and glorious ways in which He has been defi ned by a Creation in whose making He has allowed himself to share” (406). Sidney Richman sees the story as about Leo Finkle’s rebirth, the conclusion as the salvation for his secretive heart, and its Salzman as “half criminal, half messenger of God” (327). And indeed Finkle reads his story this way: “He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky” (143). But, Malamud has added the fi nal one-sentence paragraph: “Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.” Is he mourning for his daughter, of whom he has insisted that through living like an animal she has made herself dead to him? Or for Finkle? And if Finkle, is it the dead shell of the frigid rabbi, the old dead Finkle, to be replaced by new life? Or is it for Pinye Salzman and his own guilty role? Sloan briskly declares that the “dead are Stella Salzman and Leo Finkle” (57). As Richman says, such multiple possibilities enrich the story: “If the ironies undercutting the story preserve it from a kind of mythic schmaltz, the myth preserves the story from the irony” (331).

For Discussion or Writing 1. How do you believe the end of the story is to be read and interpreted? 2. The story begins with Leo Finkle, and in its course he learns something about himself and, perhaps,

finds love. But, it ends with Salzman. In what way is he the focus of Malamud’s fiction? 3. How does this story fit into the literary tradition of the “marriage plot”—as seen, for instance, in a classic Victorian novel such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility or Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence? What is significant about this tradition and the way each of the authors draws upon it? 4. Compare this story with CHAIM POTOK’s novel The Chosen, which also deals with a protagonist wrestling with faith and religious beliefs. What do both works reveal about identity and how it is formed?

“Black Is My Favorite Color” (1963) First published in the Reporter in 1963 and collected in Idiots First, in the same year, “Black Is My Favorite Color” is the first story in which Malamud used a first-person narrator. Nat Lime is a 44-year-old bachelor who owns a liquor store in Harlem; the story is largely about his relations with African Americans. Nat has a good heart, and his declarations of humanistic tolerance are not dishonest, but he is not terribly perceptive, and his understanding of the conditions blacks live under is a shallow one. In some ways he is reminiscent of the narrator of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” another bachelor who is unaware of life’s complexities and darknesses and whose kindness is always mixed with condescension. The first-person technique is combined with an artful framing. The story begins with Nat’s speaking in present tense about Charity Quietness, his once-aweek cleaning woman. Nat, lonely “after Ornita left” (Stories 74)—a detail that becomes more important later on—has asked Charity to sit down with him to eat her lunch, but after a failed attempt she has taken to eating her lunch in the toilet. He reflects, “It’s my fate with colored people” (75), and this triggers a retrospective of his experiences. The first is a baffling rejection, in childhood, by a black neighbor he had tried to befriend. The second is the frustration of his attempt at an interracial love affair with Ornita. Nat has grown up poor, but even as a child he realized that the African Americans living in his

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neighborhood were much worse off than his family. He describes a complex feeling of attraction to their lives—because of the vitality, the parties and music and good times—mixed with dread, both of an indefinite darkness and of genuine fights he has witnessed, in one of which Buster’s father stabbed a man with a chisel and was beaten and arrested. Something of the same complicated mixture of friendliness and condescension accompanies his overtures to Buster. Though he says “source questions are piddling” (Stern 53), Malamud has given one autobiographical comment that helps illuminate “Black Is My Favorite Color.” He told the interviewer Daniel Stern in 1975, when asked about the sources of his stories and novel about blacks: I lived on the edge of a black neighborhood in Brooklyn when I was a boy. I played with blacks in the Flatbush Boys Club. I had a friend—Buster; we used to go to his house every so often. I swiped dimes so we could go to the movies together on a couple of Saturday afternoons. (61)

Nat Lime also had a black childhood friend called Buster; he stole money from his mother’s pocketbook and took Buster to the movies, but, though Buster went, he walked home by himself. His “friendship” ends with a painful confrontation: One day when I wasn’t expecting it he hit me in the teeth. I felt like crying but not because of the pain. I spit blood and said, “What did you hit me for? What did I do to you?” “Because you a Jew bastard. Take your Jew movies and your Jew candy and shove them up your Jew ass.” And he ran away. I thought to myself how was I to know he didn’t like the movies. When I was a man I thought, you can’t force it. (77)

His primary black-Jewish interaction as a man is with Mrs. Ornita Harris. He makes her acquaintance first by picking up a glove she has dropped, though she reacts with irritation. Later he gives her a discount at the liquor store, and over months a relationship

develops, leading eventually to going out on dates. Nat is pleased to reflect that the passersby notice “how pretty she was for a man my type” (79). Despite Ornita’s hesitation, they become lovers. As if in some sort of complex counterweight to the advance he has made, Nat is robbed the same week by two black men with revolvers and hospitalized when one of them pistol-whips him. Meanwhile Nat’s mother has died, leaving him free to propose marriage to Ornita, but, despite vacillations, she is unwilling. The story climaxes with another anti-Semitic assault on Nat by black men, who confront the couple as Nat, because of a taxi strike, has taken Ornita to Harlem on the subway and is walking her to her house. Three men accost them, insult Ornita, accuse Nat of being a Jew slumlord, and, when Nat tries to defend Ornita from one who has slapped her, beat him and leave him in the gutter. This ends their affair, though Nat wishes to continue. Though this is obviously the most important background to Nat’s invitation to Charity, which is renewed as the story ends, there is a small coda, another memory of an effort to help “a blind man” on Eighth Avenue, rejected by the man, who can tell Nat is white, and by a black woman who shoves him aside into a fire hydrant. “That’s how it is. I give my heart and they kick me in my teeth” (84). The explorations of black-Jewish relations in this short story are subtle. There is a historical context: The early 1960s was a time when the traditional consensus that progressive Jews and blacks were natural allies had begun to be questioned. The question of where blacks fit into the big picture of anti-Semitism is raised when Nat remembers his mother’s saying, “If you ever forget you are a Jew a guy will remind you” (80). Similarly, even the muggers indicate the economic motive for some resentment of Jews, the accusation that they financially exploit blacks, and even Nat’s defense—he is no landlord; he runs a liquor store in Harlem—is hardly exculpatory. In an early comment, reflecting on Charity’s choice to eat her hard-boiled eggs by herself in his bathroom, Nat says, “That’s how it goes, only don’t get the idea of ghettoes. If there’s a ghetto I’m the one that’s in it” (73), a comment that not only connects blacks and Jews through the experience of the

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ghetto but points to a psychological ghettoization that Nat, not without some reason, feels as his generous but clumsy outreach fails again.

For Discussion or Writing 1. While Nat finds himself attracted to African Americans, he wonders why he is not close to blacks, seeking sources to blame other than himself for the difficulties he encounters in relating. 2. In having Nat tell his own story, Malamud makes a deliberate choice. Regardless of what he intends, he causes the reader to confront many uncomfortable issues surrounding interracial relationships. This is especially true for Malamud’s readership at the time this work was written, a time marked by racial tension and social inequality. Has this work become a “period piece,” documenting social anxieties during the civil rights era, or does the insight Malamud’s story provides have value in our attempts to make meaning? To form community? To understand others? If indeed Malamud implicates the reader as much as Nat, what implications does this have for us and the world in which we live? Do the questions Malamud raises remain unanswered today? Write a well-developed essay that addresses these questions, providing real-world examples, citing civil rights documents such as those that can be found online at http://www. loc.gov/rr/program/bib/civilrights/home. html, and quoting from the story. 3. How would this story read differently if told from the point of view of Ornita Harris? What would the reader like to know about her that Nat cannot tell us? 4. With Malamud’s exploration of black-white relations in the 1960s in mind, read JAMES BALDWIN’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, and FLANNERY O’CONNOR’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” Taken in tandem, what do these works of literature tell us about race relations in 1950s and 1960s America? Additionally, consider the value of using white protagonists to consider these issue versus using black characters. What fundamental differences or similarities can you find: How do

these differences and similarities inform us about American culture? 5. Melville’s narrator in “Bartleby the Scrivener” is a rather superficial bachelor, who, before his frustrating encounters with Bartleby, “had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness” but finds his deeper emotions involved. Do you think the comparison with Nat Lime is justified by Nat’s realizations?

“The Jewbird” (1963) According to Malamud’s account, the story was suggested by reading a poem, “Digressions upon a Crow,” by his friend and Bennington colleague Howard Nemerov. It seems likely that the mysterious irruption of Edgar Allan Poe’s talking bird in “The Raven” had a role, too. Malamud changes the crow to an old Jew, and, unlike Poe’s raven, the Jewbird has a large vocabulary, a prayer life, touchy emotions, and mathematical skill. The story begins with abrupt action and homespun philosophy as a narrator, whose demotic, slightly Yiddish-inflected language sounds a bit like that of the Jewbird itself, announces, “The window was open so the skinny bird flew in. Flappity-flap with its frazzled black wings. That’s how it goes. It’s open, you’re in. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate” (144). The skinny bird has flown into the Cohen household, where Cohen, his wife, Edie, and their unpromising son, Maurie, are eating dinner, and unfortunately almost lands on Cohen’s lamb chop. As he swipes at it, driving the bird to the top of the door, the story reveals its fantastic dimension: The bird cries out, “Gevalt, a pogrom!” (145). From the beginning the bird proves a register of character, as the three Cohens react in different ways. Edie is surprised by the talking bird; Maurie notes that it is Jewish; Cohen’s annoyed response is “Wise guy.” Asked what he is running from, the bird (later identified as Schwartz) says, “Anti-Semeets,” and in the ensuing conversation, “proves” that he is a Jewbird by divining, or praying in Hebrew. Again, Edie and Maurie, who rocks back and forth with the pray-

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ing, show respect; Cohen, by contrast, is suspicious: “No hat, no phylacteries?” (146). What the Jewbird wants are a refuge and feeding. Cohen grudgingly permits Schwartz to stay, though at first only overnight and later only because he is a companion to Maurie. Eventually, Schwartz earns his keep by helping Maurie with his mathematics homework. Still, Cohen resents his presence and the food he eats and insists on his living in an outdoor birdhouse on the ledge. Schwartz is not always eventempered, reacting to his unwilling host’s provocation by calling him “Grubber yung” (Yiddish for “coarse young man”) or occasionally complaining: I would rather have a human roof over my head. You know how it is at my age. I like the warm, the windows, the smell of cooking. I would also be glad to see once in a while the Jewish Morning Journal and have now and then a schnapps because it helps my breathing, thanks God. But whatever you give me, you won’t hear complaints. (148)

Cohen simmers with anger: The bird smells bad, he snores noisily, he refuses to migrate, and he eats human food rather than corn. In a clear sign of alpha-male rivalry, Cohen even accuses Schwartz of wanting to sleep in the bed with his wife. Unwilling simply to banish the bird, he tries to drive him out by tampering with his food, making noises to disturb his sleep, and even taking home a cat to torment Schwartz. The story builds on an occult relationship between the bird and Cohen’s mother. When it begins, the Cohens are in the city only because the older Mrs. Cohen is ill; it rises to its climax after she dies— perhaps freeing her son from some lingering respect for a bird who is also an elderly Jew. Unfortunately at this time Maurie receives a zero on a test. Cohen attacks the bird, which fights back by seizing his nose in its beak; eventually the man wins and throws the battered bird from the window, followed by his birdhouse. The melancholy conclusion occurs in the spring; Maurie finds the dead bird in the melted snow and weeps, “Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?”

“Anti-Semeets,” Edie said later (154). The role of anti-Semitism in this story is complicated. Schwartz is, fi nally, a victim of Cohen’s intolerance, but Cohen is the one who refuses to accept the existence of a Jewbird and declares, “He’s a foxy bastard. He thinks he’s a Jew” (147). Robert Solaratoff comments that “to an unusual degree for a Malamud story, ‘The Jewbird’ deals with that great theme of twentieth-century Jewish-American fiction, assimilation. Malamud’s usual position is that the degree to which a Jew is assimilated corresponds to the degree that he has been corrupted by contemporary American society, and he does not deviate from this stance in the story” (79). By this standard, Cohen’s assimilationist aspirations are shown by his successful, modernizing job, selling frozen foods; his ambitions (ludicrous, based on his obtaining C minus grades) to get Maurie into an Ivy League college; and, thus, his furious resentment of the Old World Jewish presence in his life represented by the bird. Cohen, then is the anti-Semeet named in Edie’s final comment. Power relationships are also unequally distributed along gender lines. Edie is a kind woman, who gives Schwartz the herring he likes, potato pancake, “and even a bit of soupmeat when Cohen wasn’t looking” (148). While Cohen suspects the bird of being a dybbuk, or a ghost, and later possibly a “goddamn devil,” Edie advances the theory that he might be “an old Jew changed into a bird by somebody” (146). But, she is cowed and helpless. The first description of the couple makes this clear, oddly enough by describing their clothing: “Cohen, a heavy man with hairy chest and beefy shorts; Edie, in skinny yellow shorts and red halter” (145). How can skinny shorts and reverent sympathy compete with beefy shorts, a hairy chest, impatience, and violence?

For Discussion or Writing 1. Do you consider Schwartz an anti-Semite (or “anti-Semeet,” a pronunciation suggestive of Yiddish)? If so, does this story comment on Jewish self-hatred, and what does it say? 2. Read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” which contains a bird messenger. Then, evaluate Malamud’s use of the same device in “The Jewbird.” What

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value does the messenger bird add in each case? How are both integral to the narration? 3. After Cohen’s unsuccessful attempt to swat the bird off his table, Schwartz says, “Gevalt, a pogrom” (his first words). A pogrom is an organized act of genocide against Jews. Is this comic overstatement or a symbolic identification of Cohen versus Schwartz as reenacting the modern history of European Jews? 4. Some masters of the modern American short story share Malamud’s attraction for the supernatural or implausible, in the American tall-tale tradition, for instance, Flannery O’Connor in “Revelation” and William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. With these works in mind, consider the value of using nonrealistic or fantastical elements. On one level, we can ascertain that these authors share a worldview that encompasses metaphysical notions. How do these metaphysical ideas affect the way we understand not only their works but also the notions of truth each enshrines?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MALAMUD AND HIS WORK 1. Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury comment, “Postwar Jewish writing is generally marked by its concern with the historical, the moral and the human anxieties of the modern self, and therefore has sometimes been described as displaying a return to realism in the contemporary American novel” (376). Do Malamud’s fictions share the concerns these critics identify in the expansive “school” to which they belong? 2. Comment on the role of humor in Malamud’s work. You might consider his explanation that “comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness” (Stern 55). 3. Critics sometimes generalize that Malamud writes about the schlemiel figure, the “well-meaning bungler” (Alter 31). Where do you find this schlemiel represented in the stories, if at all?

4. Is Malamud sentimental about the victims in his stories, or do ambiguity of his plots and the ambivalence of his narrators help him avoid that defect? 5. Nathaniel Hawthorne identified the proper subject for fiction as “the truths of the human heart.” From your reading of Malamud, how would you judge that his fictions satisfy this Hawthornean requirement? 6. Most of Malamud’s plots focus on a quite narrow range of experience: the lives of Jewish Americans living in cities. Is this a limitation? Compare Malamud to other writers with similar “limitations”—William Faulkner (Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi), Flannery O’Connor (rural Georgia), Willa Cather (Nebraska). Does such particularity militate against the achievement of “universality” in fiction? 7. Much 20th-century American fiction is insistent on realism or naturalism. Malamud, by contrast, is comfortable with incorporating the improbable or fantastic. How does his work relate to the romantic strain in American literature as represented, for instance, by Edgar Allan Poe? To what extent does Malamud’s exploration of the dark side of materialistic success in a capitalistic culture ally him with other authors who have treated this subject—for instance, F. Scott Fitzgerald, JOSEPH HELLER, Willa Cather? 8. The critic Leslie Fiedler has identified classic American literature as defective in its treatment of women and the relations between men and women (the subject at the heart of the European novel). Does Malamud’s work share this weakness, if you agree that it is a weakness? WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Abramson, Edward A. “Malamud and the Jews: An Ambiguous Relationship.” Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 146–156. Alter, Robert. “Jewishness as Metaphor.” In Bernard Malamud and the Critics, edited by Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field, 29–42. New York: New York University Press, 1970.

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Baker, Kevin. “Introduction.” In The Natural, by Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. Bernard Malamud Papers. Available online. URL: http:// osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/ malamud/index.html. Accessed March 25, 2009. Bluestone, Stephen. “God as Matchmaker: A Reading of Malamud’s ‘The Magic Barrel.’” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41 (Summer 2000): 403–410. Carino, Peter. “History as Myth in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.” Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 14 (2005): 67–77. Cheuse, Alan, and Nicholas Delbanco, eds. Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Hanson, Philip. “Horror and Ethnic Identify in ‘The Jewbird.’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (1993): 359–366. Helterman, Jeffrey. Understanding Bernard Malamud. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Lasher, Lawrence, ed. Conversations with Bernard Malamud. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Lyons, Bonnie. “The Female Characters in Bernard Malamud’s Stories.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 17 (1998): 129–136. Malamud, Bernard. “Audio Interview with Robert Giroux.” Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/robertgiroux/. Accessed March 6, 2007. ———. The Natural. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1952. ———. “Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life.” New York Times Book Review, 20 March 1988, pp. 15–16, 18. ———. The Stories of Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. Mesher, David. “Malamud’s Jewish Metaphors.” Judaism 26 (1977): 18–26.

Ozick, Cynthia. “Literary Blacks and Jews.” Midstream 18 (June–July 1972): 10–24. Pinsker, Sanford. The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Bernard Malamud.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http:// web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/ malamud.html. Accessed March 6, 2007. Richman, Sidney. “The Stories.” In Bernard Malamud and the Critics, edited by Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field, 305–331. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Ruland, Richard, and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York: Viking, 1991. Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Sloan, Gary. “Malamud’s Unmagic Barrel.” Studies in Short Fiction 22 (1995): 51–57. Smith, Janna Malamud. My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Solaratoff, Robert. Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Stern, Daniel. “The Art of Fiction, No. 52: Bernard Malamud.” Paris Review 61 (Spring 1975): 41–64. Storey, Michael L. “Pinye Salzman, Pan, and ‘The Magic Barrel.’” Studies in Short Fiction 18 (Spring 1981): 180–183. Turner, Frederick W., III. “Myth Inside and Out: Malamud’s ‘The Natural.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 1 (Winter 1968): 133–139. Walden, Daniel, and Eileen H. Watts. “Prospects for the Study of Bernard Malamud.” Resources for American Literary Study 27 (2001): 1–16. Watts, Eileen H. “Jewish Self-Hatred in Malamud’s ‘The Jewbird.’” MELUS 21 (Summer 1996): 157–163.

Merritt Moseley

Malcolm X

(Malcolm Little; El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) (1925–1965) But it is only after the deepest darkness that the greatest joy can come; it is only after slavery and prison that the sweetest appreciation of freedom can come. (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)

T

he fourth child of Earl and Louise Norton Little and the seventh child of his father, the civil rights activist Malcolm X was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 19, 1925. Malcolm Little’s father, Earl, was an outspoken opponent of white oppression, a Baptist preacher who supported the controversial Marcus Garvey (a pan-Africanist who advocated the mass exodus of blacks to Africa), and a member of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Earl, nearly illiterate, was raised in Georgia during an era when lynching was still common (for more information on the horrific history of lynching in America, visit Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America: http://withoutsanctuary. org/main.html). As a black community leader, Earl Little was dogged by racism throughout his life, something that deeply impressed Malcolm. Eventually, Earl moved the family fi rst to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then Lansing, Michigan, all the while preaching Garvey’s message of African unity and liberation. Malcolm felt especially close to his father, attending Garveyite meetings with him at a young age. Shortly after they moved into a predominantly white community near Lansing, the Littles were evicted because their lease prohibited nonwhites from occupying the land. They were offered no compensation and held fi nancially responsible for court costs and litigation fees (Perry 9). Before they were able to move out, the

farmhouse was burned to the ground. Earl told local authorities that white assailants had started the blaze but was eventually accused of arson by police investigators (Perry 10). When Louise and Earl relocated to another all-white neighborhood near Lansing, they were swindled by the seller, who owed taxes on half of the land (Perry 11). Forced from one home to another, dogged by discrimination, the Littles had great difficulty making ends meet. Even though The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Malcolm X with a great deal of assistance from A LEX H ALEY, and subsequent Malcolm X biographies often disagree about the details of Malcolm X’s early life and whether his family was threatened by the notorious white supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), there is no doubt he and his family experienced the trauma of racially motivated injustice. Tragically, Earl was killed under the wheels of a trolley when Malcolm was just six years old. Louise, unconvinced by the account of her husband’s “accidental” death, believed white men had murdered him (Perry 12). Much later in his Autobiography, Malcolm alleged that his father was assassinated by the Black Legion, a white supremacist group that was active in Michigan and Ohio for most of the 1930s. In any case, this staggering loss greatly affected Malcolm, both emotionally and economically. Though Earl had two life insurance policies,

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one of the companies labeled his death a suicide, leaving the Little family destitute. As he reports in the Autobiography, Malcolm began to act out his inner turmoil, misbehaving and shoplifting items from a local grocery store. As he grew older, he learned about the life insurance injustice and about the way the white community had viewed his father. Unfortunately, Malcolm soon found himself alone in the world when his mother, after battling depression and suffering a mental breakdown, was committed to a state mental hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Malcolm was subsequently sent to live in a series of foster homes before going to Boston in 1941 to live with his older half sister. As a teenager, Malcolm worked a variety of jobs including shoe shining, dishwashing, and working as a steward for the New Haven Railroad, a job that eventually led him to New York. It was during this time that he became involved in petty criminal activities. This quickly escalated to full-time “hustling” as he made money through prostitution, larceny, drug trafficking, and burglary. Malcolm avoided being drafted into the U.S. Army for service during World War II by convincing military psychiatrists that he was mentally unfit for active duty, acting like a black militant who wanted to kill southern whites. While he did escape battle, he did not escape the law; in 1946, after returning to Boston, Malcolm Little was arrested and convicted of a variety of crimes, including breaking and entering with his friend Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis and two white women. While Malcolm and Shorty received 10-year sentences, the two women were each sentenced to one year of probation. Here Malcolm saw fi rsthand how unjust the American legal system could be. He was sent to Charlestown Prison—a rat-infested, overcrowded facility with no running water—and then transferred to an experimental prison in nearby Norfolk, Massachusetts. Charlestown was anything but inspiring, whereas Norfolk offered unlimited access to a good library. Malcolm chose to use this time of incarceration to better himself: During the six years he served in prisons, Malcolm broke his addiction to cocaine, initiated his own

reading program, and, most important, converted to the teachings of the Nation of Islam (NOI), a religious organization led by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad that advocated racial separatism. In 1952 Malcolm became a member and subsequent minister of the NOI and was given an X as a replacement for his surname, Little. The X was meant to symbolize the unknown African name of his enslaved ancestors. Malcolm’s name changed throughout his life. As Charles Hoyt notes in his essay “The Five Faces of Malcolm X,” these names correlate to the political and spiritual conversions he experienced. As the Autobiography documents, Malcolm’s dramatic transformations came about after powerful epiphanies. For example, when Malcolm was introduced to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, he recounts the awakening he felt upon their fi rst face-to-face meeting in revelatory terms: I stared at the great man who had taken the time to write to me when I was a convict whom he knew nothing about. He was the man whom I had been told had spent years of his life in suffering and sacrifice to lead us, the black people, because he loved us so much. And then, hearing his voice, I sat leaning forward, riveted upon his words. . . . Concluding, pausing for breath, he called my name. It was like an electric shock. (Autobiography 200–201)

These transformations played a major, formative role throughout Malcolm’s life. By 1954 Malcolm X, now a minister, had started NOI temples in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. In addition to founding temples across urban America, Malcolm founded a nationally distributed newspaper, Muhammad Speaks; led an effort to organize local businesses that catered to ghetto communities; and established schools for men, women, and children. In recognition of these achievements, Elijah Muhammad elected Malcolm X as the national spokesman for the NOI. For nearly 10 years he was one of the Nation of Islam’s strongest and most effective voices.

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However, by the early 1960s a rift had formed between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. As the biographer Bruce Perry argues, Malcolm had been questioning the Nation’s ideology and methods for some time (206). In 1959, Malcolm made his fi rst trip overseas, visiting Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Ghana as Elijah Muhammad’s ambassador. When he returned from his trip, Malcolm privately expressed reservations about Muhammad’s characterization of all white-skinned people as “devils” incapable of treating African Americans as human beings (Perry 206). Another point of contention was Elijah Muhammad’s prohibition of political involvement by NOI members. As Dr. M ARTIN LUTHER K ING, JR ., and other civil rights leaders led large protests against racial bigotry that garnered international attention, Malcolm’s requests to stage similar events were repeatedly vetoed by his mentor. Eventually, Malcolm’s confrontation of racial injustice, which to the NOI entailed making a political statement, provoked the NOI leadership to charge he was abusing his position as national spokesman and advancing his own agenda. According to the Autobiography, Malcolm felt betrayed when he discovered that many of the leaders of the NOI were personally profiting from their positions in the organization. He was particularly troubled by Elijah Muhammad’s illicit sexual liaisons with female followers. After the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X was suspended from the NOI for delivering a fiery speech that not only condemned the recently deceased leader for his lack of action on civil rights but characterized his assassination as an instance of “chickens coming home to roost.” In March 1964 Malcolm responded by announcing his break with the NOI. For the next year his efforts would be geared toward organizing a black nationalist political party. He sought to use national and international means to achieve this end. In April and May 1964 Malcolm X traveled throughout the Middle East and Africa. Many of the countries he visited received him as an honored guest of state. While in Saudi Arabia as a guest of Prince Faisal, Malcolm completed the pilgrimage to Mecca, or hajj, an expectation of all Muslims that

at least once in their lifetime they pray before the Kaaba in the holy city of Mecca. Malcolm X experienced a personal transformation as he completed the hajj. Though many of the statements Malcolm had made since his last visit overseas betrayed a new and more inclusive political consciousness, his fulfi llment of the hajj marked a distinct change in Malcolm. As he explains in the Autobiography: You may be shocked by these words coming from me. But on this pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to rearrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions. This was not too difficult for me. Despite my fi rm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth. (337)

For the fi rst time in his life, Malcolm X saw people of all races unified as one during the hajj. He also studied orthodox Islam and discovered dramatic differences between its teachings and those of the NOI. He subsequently adopted a new name to signify his new understanding. Although he continued to answer to the name Malcolm X, he was also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. This transformation was also marked by changes in his physical appearance: Just as he had stopped conking his hair and wearing faddish clothes when he converted to the NOI, upon his return from Mecca, Malcolm X sported a beard. In the United States, this superficial change was seen as a sign of his further radicalized notion of black nationalism. Describing this transformative experience, Malcolm said: My thinking had been opened up wide in Mecca. I wrote long letters to my friends, in which I tried to convey to them my new insights into the American black man’s struggle and his problems as well as the depths of my search for truth and justice. “I’ve had enough of some-

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one else’s propaganda,” I had written to these friends. “I am for truth, no matter who tells it. I am for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I am a human being fi rst and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” . . . They called me “the angriest Negro in America.” I wouldn’t deny that charge; I spoke exactly as I felt. I believe in anger. I believe it is a crime for anyone who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself. I am for violence if non-violence means that we continue postponing or even delaying a solution to the American black man’s problem. (Autobiography 373)

It is significant that Malcolm also expanded his international base of support by visiting newly independent nations. These nations, recently independent from European colonial powers, welcomed Malcolm X as a leader in the same type of fight that had resulted in their liberation. Malcolm X visited Egypt, Lebanon, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Senegal, Morocco, and Algeria in 1964. He returned to Africa in July, touring 11 nations as he sought international support for a petition drive asking the United Nations to investigate the United States for human rights violations against the African-American and Native American populations. During late 1964 and early 1965, Malcolm spent time in London, giving speeches, lectures, and interviews. He also participated in a debate over the use of extremism as a political tool hosted by Oxford University. Interestingly, students in Paris were denied a similarly planned event when the government refused to allow him to enter the country. These events attest to the controversial and polarizing reaction the civil rights leader provoked: The French government refused him entry, while students at Oxford University applauded his oratory. Such reactions were to be expected: Malcolm X advocated the use of violence. In the United States, he famously used the phrase “by any means necessary” to describe what African Americans must do to achieve freedom and equality. In Great Britain, this was an equally radical proposition, though

many thought that Malcolm brilliantly defended it before a packed audience during the Oxford debates. A compelling part of his justification for such a radical stance was that a similar rationale had been used by the founding fathers of the United States as they rejected the European belief in the divine right of kings to rule and ignited the American Revolution. In February 1965 Malcolm returned to the United States to continue to organize his political party, the Organization for Afro American Unity (OAAU). Despite repeated death threats, he arranged a public meeting of the OAAU in the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. On February 21, just as he was beginning his speech, he was shot several times by at least three men in the audience identified as members of the NOI. Malcolm X was pronounced dead on arrival at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital across the street from the Audubon Ballroom. He was survived by his wife, Betty, and four daughters, Attallah, Qubilah, Ilyasah, and Gamilah, and his twin daughters Malaak and Malikah, who were born eight months after their father’s death. Though the NOI had a clear motive for killing Malcolm and reportedly attempted to do so several times, there has been much speculation regarding who exactly was behind his assassination. This speculation has been fueled by the fact that Malcolm was subjected to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance from 1953 onward (the results of which can be found on the FBI’s Web site at http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/malcolmx. htm). With help from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (which monitored his movements overseas), as well as the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services, FBI investigators amassed more than 4,000 pages of information on Malcolm (Perry 324). Many claim that his entry into France was thwarted by government intervention. J. Edgar Hoover, the now-infamous head and founder of the FBI, reportedly tried to aggravate the existing confl ict between Malcolm and the NOI and may have indirectly caused his death (Goldman 429–430). Malcolm’s stated intention of taking the plight of

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African Americans before the United Nations, a spectacle that would have seriously damaged the international stature of the U.S. government, has also been cited as a possible motive for his assassination (Jenkins and Tryman 42). However, speculation about government complicity in the assassination plot has been overshadowed by the fact that Elijah Muhammad and other NOI members did not deny that they were responsible for ordering Malcolm’s death (Perry 373–374). When Malcolm returned from Mecca, he confessed: “In the past I have made sweeping indictments of all white people. I will never be guilty of that again.” Such statements show a dynamic human being wrestling with the world, a man willing to change and admit error. This portrait, although not the one captured by common representations of him in the media, reveals a rare, complex human being, one deeply affected by personal loss and attuned to social injustice.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (1965) Written by Alex Haley after extensive interviews, informal conversations, and research, The Autobiography of Malcolm X chronicles the life and times of a key figure in the Civil Rights movement and provides an essential understanding of the social context for black nationalism. In addition to its value as a historical document, Malcolm X’s Autobiography tells a human story, a story of a man who rose from poverty to become one of the most important and revolutionary spokespersons for the rights of African Americans in the 20th century. The transformation of Malcolm Little, a boy in an oppressed family in Nebraska, into Malcolm X, staunch defender of his people against the “white devil,” and, fi nally, the reflective humanist El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, testifies to the protean nature of the human mind. Moreover, it traces the ceaseless movement of an intellect receptive to new ideas and modes of living. This spiritual journey is set against the backdrop of an unjust world, a world that Malcolm X reflects upon after embracing

orthodox Islam and traveling to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Though the Autobiography stands as an important historical and political document, it is also a literary work, a work that draws from multiple literary traditions. Malcolm’s story, fashioned by Haley, resembles the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass, both of whom recount their experiences of racial oppression, followed by their self-education, and, ultimately, their emancipation from slavery. As Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography does, Haley’s narrative presents Malcolm’s life as a process of diligent self-improvement, not only a quest for knowledge and truth, but also a continuous effort to fi nd the best way to live— both privately, that is to say, spiritually, and as a social being. But, as the theorist and commentator bell hooks points out, Malcolm’s Autobiography possesses a psychological depth lacking from the texts it draws upon: “Only Malcolm X charts the decolonization of a black mind in a manner that far surpasses any experience described in slave narratives” (hooks 79). Hooks attributes this depth to the distinctly religious and spiritual nature of Malcolm’s “journey of self-realization,” a journey that ultimately leads him to Mecca and his subsequent recognition of the oneness of humanity before a benevolent God (hooks 80). The book can be divided into three major sections. First are the early years. At a young age, Malcolm Little’s experiences often mirrored those of others in the African-American community. After the death of his father, Malcolm’s mother struggled as a single parent reliant on inadequate social welfare policies, as did so many other single AfricanAmerican women. Upon entering the workforce, racial segregation and discouragement from his teachers prevented Malcolm from becoming a lawyer, and he resorted to shoe shining, a career soon abandoned for the lucrative opportunities afforded by “hustling.” Moving fi rst to Boston and then New York City, a zoot suit–sporting Malcolm became enamored of the glamorous life afforded by selling marijuana and frequenting nightclubs. Despite the dangers of this life, Malcolm Little excelled as “Detroit Red,” an alias he chose while hustling on

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the streets of Harlem. Reflecting on the way people lived in Harlem and his own descent into activities associated with hustling, an older and wiser Malcolm X observes: “In the ghettoes the white man has built for us, he has forced us not to aspire to greater things, but to view everyday living as survival—and in that kind of a community, survival is what is expected” (Autobiography 93). In Harlem, Malcolm used drugs, sold drugs, lived a life of crime, carried multiple fi rearms, and earned a reputation as a man not to cross. Now engaging in prostitution, burglary, robbery, and bootlegging, “Detroit Red” was involved in activities that put him into contact with the Mafia. Malcolm learned much about corruption in American society from his apprenticeship in the criminal underworld, claiming, “The country’s entire social, political, and economic structure, the criminal, the law, and the politicians were actually inseparable partners” (Autobiography 119). As might be expected, this life of violent excess landed Malcolm in jail after nearly being murdered. He was arrested for breaking into a residence with his friend Shorty and two white women. Malcolm was outraged when he discovered that the involvement of the white women caused his sentence to be severe. In her analysis of the Autobiography as spiritual journey, bell hooks likens Malcolm’s time as a hustler to the “wandering in the wilderness” most protagonists of traditional religious literature endure before a spiritual awakening (hooks 80). As Dante, for example, fi nds himself in a dark wood before embarking on his journey through hell, then purgatory, and fi nally paradise, so does Malcolm descend from the streets of Harlem into the bowels of the American justice system. Malcolm’s imprisonment in Massachusetts marks the second major phase of his life story. While incarcerated, a time characterized by hooks as his “dark night of the soul,” Malcolm began to believe that no matter the enormity of a sinner’s error, redemption is forever possible (hooks 80). This was a dramatic change for Malcolm, whose atheism and cursing of God after arriving had earned him the nickname Satan. Malcolm saw a chance for his salvation after receiving a letter from

his brother, Reginald, who wrote of the Nation of Islam (NOI). With the encouragement of his family, now members of the NOI in Detroit, Malcolm started corresponding with the Honorable Elijah Muhammad while still in prison, fi nally meeting him in Chicago after his release in 1952. Not long after this meeting, Malcolm Little replaced his last name with the letter X: a letter symbolizing the namelessness of his enslaved ancestors. During his time in prison, Malcolm reflected upon his life and the world of knowledge available to him in the prison library. As he says in The Autobiography, “I would just like to study. I mean ranging study, because I have a wide-open mind” (Autobiography 388). With a renewed sense of self and an everexpanding mind, Malcolm was ready to reach out to the world and make a difference in others’ lives. For the next decade, Malcolm X endeavored to redeem the community he now recognized as his own, tirelessly working on behalf of his people by whatever means necessary while espousing values he thought would benefit and nurture the “so-called Negro.” As a spokesperson for the NOI, most of Malcolm’s statements were dictated by the organizations’ ideology, an ideology that espoused the values of the American dream—material prosperity, self-reliance, individual responsibility—while also advocating racial separatism. Redeemed and motivated to do good, Malcolm X strove to make this dream a reality for those who believed in the leadership and teachings of Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm X’s discovery of corruption in the upper ranks of the NOI ushered in the third phase of his life story and the text’s narrative. Berating the leadership for elevating themselves above the rest of NOI members, Malcolm X describes various abuses of power by Elijah Muhammad and his lieutenants. This corruption could not help but remind him of the world he had explored as “Detroit Red”: For Malcolm X, both of these situations—street hustling and NOI rivalries—were rotten with corruption, situations that would inevitably lead to envy, jealousy, greed, and murder. Malcolm’s feud with Elijah Muhammad, who had assumed a godlike stature in his mind, has been compared by bell hooks to “the anguish [of

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Christ] in the garden of Gethesmane, expressed in his tortured cry ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ ” (hooks 87). This crisis of faith ultimately leads Malcolm again to question his beliefs and worldly conduct, resulting in the ultimate fulfi llment of the spiritual narrative running throughout the Autobiography. No longer under the spell of the Nation of Islam and its racist policies, the last section of The Autobiography chronicles Malcolm X’s intellectual development after making the hajj. Journeying to Mecca, Malcolm witnessed harmonious interracial relations for the fi rst time in his life as he prayed with thousands of others from different parts of the world at the Kaaba. He was also exposed to the orthodox teachings of Islam, teachings that did not demonize people according to the color of their skin. The man who emerged, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, accepted responsibility for the improvement of his community, a task he associated with a much greater and more ambitious goal: to improve the lives of those living in all parts of the postcolonial, undeveloped world. Malcolm X’s teachings on black nationalism were deeply influenced by his extensive travels in former colonies. More inclusive and independent than his previous ways of thinking, these teachings are partially reflected in the tone and perspective from which The Autobiography is told. However, as Haley states in his epilogue, Malcolm had expressed concern over the glowing descriptions of Elijah Muhammad and the NOI that he had written in the Autobiography before his break with them, ultimately deciding to let them go unchanged (Autobiography 419). Such details raise more general concerns about the perspective of the narrative, concerns that become even more complicated with the intervention of Haley in the composition process. In his essay “Malcolm X across the Genres,” the critic Neil Painter asserts that autobiography, even when it is not “told to” another but is written by the person who lived the life, reworks existential fragments into a meaningful new whole, as seen from a particular vantage point. Even when the autobiography

is not a collaboration, the narrator passes over much in silence and highlights certain themes that become salient in light of what the narrator concludes he or she has become. (Painter 433)

Though it is generally agreed that Haley was faithful to Malcolm’s wishes regarding how his life was to be portrayed, Malcolm never saw the fi nal product (which includes a 70-page epilogue penned by Haley after Malcolm’s death). Recognizing such issues should not detract from the power and validity of the Autobiography and the insights it contains, but merely emphasize the text’s status as a work of literature, rather than an unadulterated historical account of one man’s life. Commenting on Malcolm’s re-creation and alteration of events, the writer and critic David Bradley asserts that such discrepancies point to the aesthetic achievement of the Autobiography as a “literary expression,” a “consciously crafted [myth] of struggle and uplift” (Bradley 42). By the time Malcolm fi nished collaborating with Haley, he knew his fate and prophesied not only his death but also the stereotypical and reactionary way he would be viewed in the last pages of the Autobiography: [Each] day I live as if I am already dead, and I tell you what I would like for you to do. When I am dead—I say it that way because from the things I know, I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its fi nished form—I want you to just watch and see if I’m not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with “hate.” (Autobiography 388–389)

When Malcolm X was murdered, his family was left fatherless, his community was left with one less capable leader, and violence was proven, once again, to be an effective political weapon. Despite Malcolm’s failure to found a viable black nationalist party or take the case of African-American human rights before the United Nations, his life, as captured in his Autobiography, was one of triumph.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. In what ways does the story of Malcolm X offer validation of the belief that “life is significant because of its journey, not its fi nal destination”? 2. Using Malcolm X’s Autobiography, write a welldeveloped essay that explores how the American dream of “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps” weighs against the corruptions that accompany successful attainment of power, status, and privilege. How can the Autobiography be read as a critique of the American dream and its insistence that self-reliance is the key to success? What characteristics are common to both Malcolm X’s life and the American dream? 3. As Malcolm matured, he focused fi rst on the level of comfort available to him as an individual followed by the level of achievement realized by the Afro-American community. The third phase of his life concludes with his developing concern about the status of the world’s underserved peoples. Are there examples that support this view of his life? With these examples in mind, construct a well-developed essay on the stages of Malcolm X’s life, detailing his thinking and the way it changed during each of these phases. 4. Read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of a Slave. Next, think about the issues both Malcolm X and Douglass had to face. Finally, write a well-developed essay that compares the solutions each provides and the audience each addresses. How, in both cases, does the audience determine what is said and how it is said?

Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements (1965) This work was published immediately after Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. This collection of speeches and interviews represents the major tenets of his political and social beliefs in the last years of his life. Chief among the writings in this book are the speeches “Message to the Grassroots,” which advocates unity among progressive people, especially their leadership, in pursuing their goal; “The Ballot or the Bullet,” which is a response to

the Congress’s hesitation in passing the civil rights bill; and “The Black Revolution,” which defends the use of violence in achieving political ends. The poignancy of these speeches is most apparent when they are seen or heard. As did the West African griots, Malcolm X made significant contributions to oral literature and rarely wrote for publication. His wit and humor readily made his ideas appealing to his audience. Even though it often appeared that he was speaking ad hoc, he was not. He prepared extensive notes for his speeches yet used them only as guides as he read the crowd and adjusted accordingly, using the call-and-response style commonly used among African-American orators, as well as Judeo-Christian liturgies heard across the world (you can listen to many Malcolm X speeches on the Web at such sites as http://www.brothermalcolm. net/mxwords/whathesaidarchive.html).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Commenting on religion and resistance, Malcolm X argues: There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. In fact, that’s that old time religion. That’s the one that Ma and Pa used to talk about: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and a head for a head, and a life for a life. That’s a good religion. And nobody resents that kind of religion being taught but a wolf, who intends to make you his meal. . . . No, preserve your life, it’s the best thing you’ve got. And if you’ve got to give it up, let it be even-steven. (Malcolm X Speaks 12–13)

What does Malcolm X mean by “a wolf”? Is he serious when he encourages blacks to make things “even-steven”? On the basis of your reading of Malcolm X’s essays, argue whether Malcolm X is justifying violence.

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2. Consider the following passage from Malcolm X’s “Message to the Grassroots”: I would like to make a few comments concerning the difference between the black revolution and the Negro revolution. There’s a difference. Are they both the same? And if they’re not, what is the difference? What is the difference between a black revolution and a Negro revolution? First, what is a revolution? Sometimes I’m inclined to believe that many of our people are using this word “revolution” loosely, without taking careful consideration [of] what this word actually means, and what its historic characteristics are. When you study the historic nature of revolutions, the motive of a revolution, the objective of a revolution, and the result of a revolution, and the methods used in a revolution, you may change words. You may devise another program. You may change your goal and you may change your mind. Look at the American Revolution in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land. Why did they want land? Independence. How was it carried out? Bloodshed. Number one, it was based on land, the basis of independence. And the only way they could get it was bloodshed. The French Revolution—what was it based on? The land-less against the landlord. What was it for? Land. How did they get it? Bloodshed. Was no love lost; was no compromise; was no negotiation. I’m telling you, you don’t know what a revolution is. ‘Cause when you fi nd out what it is, you’ll get back in the alley; you’ll get out of the way. The Russian Revolution— what was it based on? Land. The land-less against the landlord. How did they bring it about? Bloodshed. You haven’t got a revolution that doesn’t involve bloodshed. And you’re afraid to bleed. I said, you’re afraid to bleed.

With Malcolm X’s thoughts in mind, write a well-developed essay on the nature of revolution, arguing whether you think Malcolm X was right. If so, what are the consequences? If not, why not? Are the idealistic reasons that people hold for revolt wrong? Is what Malcolm says about land correct?

By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X (1970) As does Malcolm X Speaks, this book includes significant speeches and interviews that represent major aspects of Malcolm X’s political thought. What sets this work apart from Malcolm X Speaks is that it is exclusively comprised of materials pertinent to Malcolm X’s views after his estrangement from the Nation of Islam. Rather than speaking in the name of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, in By Any Means Necessary Malcolm X conveys his profoundly changed views on theology, politics, and social conventions. In each of these areas, he expressed views that were no longer parochially confi ned to the teachings and daily dictates of the NOI’s commander in chief. Instead of referring to Message to the Blackman or How to Eat to Live, both authored by Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm relies on the Qur’an as his ultimate authority in this collection. Rather than place all of his emphasis on the development of different components of the NOI, such as its paramilitary organization the Fruit of Islam or the official newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, Malcolm X organized a political party designed to attract black people of all religious beliefs. Instead of seeing the world in exclusively black and white racial terms that focused on civil rights, he broadened his view by offering means for multiracial and international considerations, as human rights became his central focus. Finally, this book is significant because Betty Shabazz authorized it after her husband’s death. She was not identified as the editor, but it is clear that her copyright of the work was intended as her approval of its contents.

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The speeches included in Malcolm X Speaks and in By Any Means Necessary are referred to in the fi nal chapters of his Autobiography. The fi nal year of his life was hectic and did not allow much time to be spent with Alex Haley reflecting on the meaning of the events in 1964 and early 1965. The pace and urgency of his life are reflected in the abbreviated versions of speeches referred to in the Autobiography.

For Discussion or Writing 1. After reading By Any Means Necessary, write a well-developed essay exploring how Malcolm X’s defi nition of black nationalism changed after his journeys to Africa and Mecca. 2. Many claim that Malcolm X is one of the most misunderstood political activists of the 20th century: His legacy continues to suffer from the common misperception that he was and remained to the end of his life a black supremacist, as was the NOI leader Elijah Muhammad. Construct an essay in which you argue for or against this contention, using passages from By Any Means Necessary to support everything you say. 3. In an interview with A. B. Spellman, Malcolm X speaks at length about the “Christian-Gandhian Philosophy” professed by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Read one of King’s works, such as Stride toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958), and evaluate Malcolm X’s comments. Write a well-developed essay in which you take a fi rm stance on whether Malcolm X’s criticisms of the nonviolent faction of the Civil Rights movement are valid. Is Malcolm X’s rationale for using violence in self-defense convincing? Does King provide a more convincing rationale for nonviolent protest? Make sure to support your argument with passages from both texts.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MALCOLM X AND HIS WORK 1. For Malcolm X, what are the major differences between civil rights and human rights?

2. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, what are Malcolm X’s views of women? Given his belief at the end of his life in the equality of the races, in what ways might his views of the role of women have changed? Are there indications of this in his later writings and speeches? 3. Think about Malcolm X’s audience. He claimed to be concerned primarily with reaching African Americans, yet his speeches often address whites as well as the white news media. Weighing these issues and citing at least two of Malcolm X’s speeches, write a well-developed essay on the rhetoric he employs and speculate, from your understanding of the text and in light of the times, why Malcolm often targeted a white audience. 4. After reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X, coauthored by Alex Haley, read either Remembering Malcolm (1992) by Malcolm X’s assistant minister, Benjamin Karim, or Bruce Perry’s controversial biography Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America (1991). As you read, think about how Malcolm X is represented in each. What do the portraits they paint look like? With that question in mind, write a well-developed essay that highlights the differences we encounter when comparing the two. 5. Compare Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech with Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet.” With their shared use of alliteration and repetition, present a thesis that hypothesizes how their employing of these literary devices differs. 6. In 1964, Malcolm X established the Black Nationalist Organization of Afro-American Unity, and in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale established the militant Black Panther Party. As chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Stokely Carmichael advocated black power and separatism and coined the phrase institutionalized racism. These movements were influenced by both black pride and increasing disenchantment with the American political system, fostered by continuing racism, U.S. military involvement

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in Vietnam, and the assassinations of Medgar Evers in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968. Research these movements by fi nding a reliable Internet site or a detailed reference work such as an encyclopedia dealing with civil rights. Finally, write a well-developed essay that argues why black nationalism came to be, what black separatism means, and how these ideas relate to our society today. WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Benson, Thomas W. “Malcolm X.” In American Orators of the Twentieth Century: Critical Studies and Sources, edited by Bernard K. Duffy and Halford R. Ryan, 317–322. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Bloom, Harold, ed. Alex Haley and Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Chelsea House, 1996. Bradley, David. “Malcolm’s Mythmaking.” Transition 56 (1992): 20–46. Breitman, George. The Assassination of Malcolm X. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1991. Carangelo, Audrey. “What’s in a Name? Understanding Malcolm X.” 2006. Discovery Education. Available online. URL: http://school.discovery. com/lessonplans/programs/malcolmx/. Accessed June 16, 2006. Carson, Clayborne. Malcolm X: The FBI File. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991. Clark, John Henrik. The Man and His Times. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1969. Cone, James. Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1991. Cruse, Harold. Rebellion or Revolution? New York: Morrow, 1968. Davis, Lenwood. Malcolm X: A Selected Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1984. Davis, Thulani. Malcolm X: The Great Photographs. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1993. DeCaro, Louis A., Jr. Malcolm and the Cross: The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, and Christianity. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

———. On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Doctor, Bernard. Malcolm X for Beginners. Danbury, Conn.: Writers & Readers, 1992. Dyson, Michael Eric. Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Epps, Archie. Malcolm X: Speeches at Harvard. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Essien-Udom, E. U. Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Evanzz, Karl. The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999. Gallen, David. Malcolm X as They Knew Him. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. Gardell, Mattias. In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Goldman, Peter L. The Death and Life of Malcolm X. 2d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Ballantine, 1965. hooks, bell. “Sitting at the Feet of the Messenger: Remembering Malcolm X.” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. Jamal, Hakim A. From the Dead Level: Malcolm X and Me. New York: Random House, 1971. Jenkins, Robert L., and Mfanya Donald Tryman, eds. “Conspiracy Theories of the Assassination of Malcolm X.” In The Malcolm X Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Johnson, Timothy V. Malcolm X: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1986. Kelley, Robert D. G. “House Negroes on the Loose: Malcolm X and the Black Bourgeoisie.” Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998): 419–435. Lincoln, C. Eric. Black Muslims in America. New York: Kayode, 1991.

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Leeman, Richard W., ed. African-American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Lomax, Louis E. When the Word Is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and the Black Muslim World. New York: Signet Books, 1964. Malcom X. Interview by A. B. Spellman (New York, March 19, 1964). In By Any Means Necessary. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992, 23–35. Malcolm X. Directed by Spike Lee. DVD. Warner Brothers, 2005. “Malcolm X F.B.I. Files.” Federal Bureau of Investigation. Available online. URL: http://foia.fbi. gov/foiaindex/malcolmx.htm. Accessed October 29, 2009. “Malcolm X House Site.” We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights movement. Available online. URL: http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/ travel/civilrights/ne1.htm. Accessed October 29, 2009. Malcolm X Museum Web site. Available online. URL: http://www.themalcolmxmuseum.org/. Accessed June 16, 2006. Malcolm-X.org. Available online. URL: http://www. malcolm-x.org. Accessed May 21, 2007. Malcolm X Project at Columbia University, 2001– 2006. Columbia University Center for Contemporary Black History Institute for Research in African-American Studies. Available online. URL: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ccbh/mxp/. Accessed June 16, 2006. “Malcolm X Webliography.” brothermalcolm.net. Available online. URL: http://www.brothermalcolm. net/research/webliography.html. Accessed June 16, 2006.

Marable, Manning. The Malcolm X Reader: His Life, His Thought, His Legacy. New York: New American Library, 1993. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978. ———. Message to the Blackman in America. Philadelphia: Hakim’s, 1965. Muhammad, Elijah. How to Eat to Live. Atlanta: Messenger Elijah Muhammad Propagation Society, 1967. The Official Web Site of Malcolm X. Estate of Malcolm X c/o CMG Worldwide. Available online. URL: http://www.cmgww.com/historic/malcolm/index.htm. Accessed June 16, 2006. Painter, Neil. “Malcom X across the Gennes.” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1994): 396–404. Perry, Bruce. Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1991. ———. Malcolm X: The Last Speeches. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989. “The Smoking Gun: The Malcolm X Files.” thesmokinggun.com. Available online. URL: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/malcolmx/ malcolmx.html. Accessed June 16, 2006. Strickland, William. Malcolm X Make It Plain. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Wolfenstein, Eugene Victor. The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution. New York: Guilford, 1993. Wood, Joe, ed. Malcolm X: In Our Own Image. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

John Becker, Blake G. Hobby, and Dwight Mullen

Paule Marshall (1929–

)

True, I am indebted to those writers, white and black, whom I read during my formative years and still read for instruction and pleasure. But they were preceded in my life by another set of giants whom I always acknowledged before all others: the group of women around the table long ago. (“From the Poets in the Kitchen,” originally published as part of the Making of a Writer series in the New York Times Book Review, January 9, 1983)

T

he daughter of Barbadian-American immigrants, Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York, on April 9, 1929. As did many immigrants the world over, Marshall’s parents, Samuel and Ada Clement Burke, traveled to the United States hoping to achieve the American dream and the economic prosperity it promised. Despite growing up in an urban environment quite different from the world her parents knew, Marshall was never without Caribbean culture. In her mother’s kitchen, a young Marshall heard of her people’s past, told through the words of other island women. The rhythms of their voices entranced Marshall at an early age, and she later recognized these women as poets with a lasting and profound influence on her work. Until her fi rst trip to Barbados at the age of nine, these kitchen poets and her parents’ stories were Marshall’s only connection to her parents’ homeland. After witnessing the Caribbean people, culture, and landscapes for herself, Marshall, like the kitchen poets of Brooklyn, was inspired to re-create the majesty of the land through words. She returned from her year-long stay in Barbados with her own accent and several poems celebrating all she had seen. Marshall drew from these experiences in her later writings, in particular the autobiographical short story “To Da-duh, in Memoriam.” Marshall soon lost her accent after being teased by her Brooklyn schoolmates, but she never lost her

fascination with the land of her ancestors. When she was a child, Barbados stirred Marshall to poetry; when she was an adult, island culture inspired her to write complex novels examining the differences between the American and Caribbean ways of life. Marshall’s adult writing began at Brooklyn College, where she majored in English after a friend encouraged her to write. This decision to pursue a career with words was not surprising: In addition to the poetry she heard in her mother’s kitchen, Marshall spent countless hours in the library, reveling in the works of 19th-century novelists such as William Thackeray and Charles Dickens. Though she lived vicariously through such books as a young girl, Marshall never saw herself in them. Victorian England, distant from Brooklyn and Barbados, led Marshall to believe that in these great works something she “couldn’t quite defi ne was missing” (“Poets in the Kitchen”). What Marshall sought at this young age was a literature that better represented her own heritage and experience, not that of someone else. She eventually found what she was seeking in a collection of poems by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Marshall had heard the African-American dialects found in Dunbar’s poetry before but had never seen them on a printed page. Dunbar’s characters, though without Caribbean accents, reminded Marshall of her own family, and for the fi rst time she met a people like her through the written word.

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From this point on, Marshall continued to read African-American authors outside school, complaining much later that such influential and historically important African-American authors as Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth were conspicuously absent from her education. Later, at Brooklyn College, Marshall read great European writers such as Thomas Mann and Joseph Conrad, both of whom she cites as major influences on her work. Upon Marshall’s foray into the literary world, experimentation was increasingly common; many writers began using postmodern techniques, manipulating language and emphasizing the artificiality of their works. Rather than adopting such a style, Marshall clung fast to psychological realism and defended the traditional novel’s value. She would later prove the form’s worth in her own novels, which provide keen insights into the psyches of her characters. Her work couples the stylistic qualities of the early modernists with the thematic concerns of many African-American writers, whom she would not read with much consistency until her graduation from Brooklyn College in 1953. Shortly after graduation, Marshall soon found work writing for Our World, a small black magazine similar to Ebony, and enrolled at Hunter College two years later to continue her studies. Marshall also returned to the New York public libraries of her childhood, this time as a librarian. In 1954, she published her fi rst short story, “The Valley Between,” her only work to focus exclusively on white characters. She married Kenneth Marshall in 1950 and gave birth to a son, Evan-Keith Marshall, before divorcing her husband in 1963. She would later marry Nourry Menard, a Haitian businessman, in 1970. While writing for Our World, which assigned her to cover stories in the Caribbean and South America, Marshall also began to write about her world. After her workdays writing for the magazine, Marshall spent her nights penning her autobiographical fi rst novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Marshall was by no means the only AfricanAmerican woman writing at this time. GWENDOLYN BROOKS’s Maud Martha was published in 1953,

the year Marshall graduated from Brooklyn College. Yet, she would not read or know of Brooks’s seminal novel until the 1960s, along with the works of several other African-American women not mentioned in her schools. Many of these writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, were forgotten relics of the Harlem Renaissance, a golden age of African-American arts. When Marshall’s parents immigrated to the United States in the 1920s and even when Marshall was born in 1929, AfricanAmerican musicians, painters, poets, and writers received unprecedented critical and public attention throughout the world. The movement lasted into the 1930s, at which point the Great Depression and its economic repercussions overshadowed the success of African-American artists in the previous decade. Had Marshall written Brown Girl, Brownstones at this time, it would have been very successful. Instead, Marshall’s fi rst novel appeared when African Americans struggled not to be recognized as artists but as people, people worthy of the rights denied them by a segregated America. Marshall began her writing amid the Civil Rights movement, a time characterized by sit-ins, marches, and nationwide protests against unjust laws that denied African Americans equal rights. R ALPH ELLISON’s Invisible Man (1952) spoke for an African-American population unseen as individuals worthy of equality, three decades after the Harlem Renaissance. Ellison’s novel was an unprecedented success. As one of few authors to address African-American concerns, Ellison had a large influence on black authors, especially Marshall, who later deemed his collection of essays Shadow and Act (1964) her “literary bible.” With racial tension reaching fever pitch across the United States, many readers embraced novels like Invisible Man regardless of their race. Authors such as Ellison sought to illuminate the AfricanAmerican’s individuality and humanity. While the majority of the reading public knew the works of African-American male writers such as Ellison and Richard Wright, female African-American authors, including Brooks and Marshall, remained obscure and unappreciated: Brown Girl, Brownstones,

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though applauded by critics, did not garner much attention outside the literati. Marshall received similar reviews for her collection of novellas, Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), as well as her second novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969). Like her fi rst novel, these works were reviewed favorably by critics but virtually ignored by the public. Marshall remained in relative obscurity until 1981, when the Feminist Press republished the then-out-of-print Brown Girl, Brownstones. Much had happened in the two decades following the book’s initial publication to warrant a second printing: Women joined the Civil Rights movement alongside African Americans and other minorities in the struggle for equality, igniting a demand for literature that represented such marginalized groups. Feminist criticism emerged, and within it black feminist criticism. These efforts to balance what many viewed as a homogeneous, white, and European literary tradition helped bring Marshall’s works to light, as well as works by Brooks and other African-American women. In the years before the reprinting of Marshall’s fi rst novel, a newer generation of African-American women writers surfaced, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. These women would tackle in their literature the themes Marshall had 20 years prior. Their works, as do those of Marshall, investigate not only what it means to be black but what it means to be black and a woman. Marshall’s fi rst novel and its second printing helped usher in a new group of writers equally dedicated to examining the inner consciousness of the black woman in America. In this way, Marshall transcends what W. E. B. DuBois called “double-consciousness”—the problem of being black and an American—and reveals the complexities inherent in being black, female, American, and of Caribbean descent. As such, literary critics have branded Marshall as a writer with myriad classifications: feminist, pan-Africanist, African American, Caribbean. Marshall is none of these and yet all; she falls into many categories because she focuses on themes and characters that provoke many questions about identity. Marshall’s characters do not just face the “two warring ideals”

of which DuBois spoke. Rather, they journey across foreign lands and ideologies searching for a single identity pulled from multiple sources. Marshall encountered this upon growing up in Brooklyn as a black female: The landscapes of the Caribbean are as much a part of Marshall’s own identity as the brownstone apartments in which she lived. Her life and works emphasize the theme of reconciliation, of synthesizing often different or contradictory lifestyles into a single identity. Reconciliation and identity are universal themes found not only in Brooklyn and Barbados but the world over. Specifically, however, Marshall targets the African diaspora, a term referring to people of African descent throughout the world. Many Africans were taken aboard slave ships bound for the United States, but a large number were also transported to South America and the Caribbean. Thus, Marshall and her family trace their ancestry from Africa to the Caribbean, from the Caribbean to the United States. As her characters do, Marshall possesses a hybrid identity composed of several geographies and lifestyles. In her texts, she paints beautiful pictures of her characters’ island homelands. Yet, this is not to say she focuses solely on the lands from which her characters, as well as she, are displaced. She never loses sight of America, setting the Caribbean lifestyle against the American way of life, as seen most notably in her second novel, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. In Marshall’s fiction, America is as influential a setting as Africa or the Caribbean, for it represents an important shard of a splintered identity. As the title of Brown Girl, Brownstones suggests, Marshall’s conception of her own identity was formed in Brooklyn long before spreading to the shores of Barbados. All of Marshall’s works exhibit this delineation between place and displacement, between home and homeland. Rather than advocating a return to a geographic location, her works encourage a return to and reappraisal of the past. Her third novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983), which won the Before Columbus American Book Award, relies heavily on African folklore and mythology. As Marshall’s autobiographical character Selina Boyce demonstrates, it is through the past that people—

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especially displaced people of the diaspora—better understand themselves: By knowing where they are from, they can more fi rmly grasp who they are. Postcolonial critics, who are often concerned with how to reclaim cultural identity and autonomy after they have been effaced and repressed by imperialism, have praised Marshall’s works for their penetrating insights into the effects of colonialism on the colonized. Marshall published her collection of short stories Reena and Other Stories in 1983, again with the aid of the Feminist Press. In 1991, she published Daughters, a novel focusing on a father-daughter relationship much like hers with her father. A year later, in 1992, she received the MacArthur Prize Fellowship for lifetime achievement. She published her fi fth novel, The Fisher King, to positive reviews in 2000. In addition to her writings, Marshall has taught or lectured at such esteemed institutions as Yale University, Oxford University, Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Students and scholars continue to read Marshall’s work, especially as interest in feminist, postcolonial, and cultural criticism increases. As so many black women writers have attested, Marshall’s work has inspired multiple generations of authors and has led many to rethink their defi nition of blackness. She affords her readers a vision of the modern, multiethnic woman of color struggling to survive in a racially divided world. Through her apt characterizations and poetic language, Marshall leads us to imagine possibilities: the many ways we can rethink and re-create, out of the dustbin of the past, a culture that preserves the vitality of what has been and envisions what may be.

Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) As a coming-of-age tale, or bildungsroman, Marshall’s fi rst novel belongs beside Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and J. D. SALINGER’s The Catcher in the Rye as an American exemplar of the form. Each of these works charts

a young person’s path from innocence to experience, but unlike Twain and Salinger’s protagonists, Marshall’s main character must make sense of not just the world but several worlds. Contributing to its lack of popular success when fi rst published in 1959, Brown Girl, Brownstones appeared at a time when African-American literature more often told the journey from boyhood to manhood, and welldeveloped female characters were all but absent. Now, along with Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953), Marshall’s novel is considered one of the fi rst works of American literature to explore the maturation of a young black woman realistically. As its title suggests, Brown Girl, Brownstones tells the story of Selina Boyce, a young girl of Barbadian descent living with her family in one of Brooklyn’s many brownstone apartments. These apartments are symbolic of the American dream that lured many immigrants to New York, many from the Caribbean. Most of these residents desire to “buy house,” and it is this materialistic ideal more than any other that generates the novel’s confl ict. In a reversal of Barbadian and American gender roles, Selina’s mother, Silla, works long hours in a munitions factory so that one day they can purchase their rented brownstone, while her father, Deighton, who dreams of his homeland, desires only to make enough money to return to Barbados and build a house on his newly inherited property. Sharing Silla’s dreams of upward mobility is the Barbadian Homeowners Association, of which she and many other Barbadian immigrants are members. Although the novel is not set in Barbados, the island country functions as a character; it shapes Selina and her family, who dream of returning to the island while so many other Barbadian immigrants, after losing touch with their homeland, desire only a brownstone home in the multiethnic community of Brooklyn. The brownstones the immigrants strive to own represent materialism and American capitalism. They instill in the Barbadian community thoughts of homeownership and wealth, and these principles elicit opposing reactions within the Boyce family: Silla struggles to achieve the American dream, Deighton rejects these priorities, and

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young Selina tries to glean from her parents the values most significant to her. On her journey to womanhood, Selina’s identity is also shaped by the racism and sexism she encounters growing up as a young black woman in America. Her attempts at identifying with others are further complicated by her Barbadian heritage: Though the other immigrants and members of the Barbadian Homeowners Association share her heritage, they desire to assimilate into the American way of life, unlike Deighton, who detests the avaricious materialism of America and wishes to return to Barbados. As a child, Selina sides with her father, whose eyes gleam every time he speaks of Barbados. An idealistic young girl, Selina shares her father’s enthusiasm for returning to Barbados and sees her mother as an enemy, a threat to her father. Yet as she blossoms into a young woman, Selina notices how much she resembles her mother. She tries to control a later lover, Clive Springer (a failed Barbadian artist not unlike Deighton Boyce), in the same way her mother attempted to control her father. Both are strong-willed women upon whom men depend, and both will take any measures to achieve their goals. When Deighton foolishly spends the money from selling his property, Silla has him deported back to Barbados, where, within sight of his homeland, he either jumps or is pushed off the boat and drowns. Similarly, Selina manipulates the Barbadian Homeowners Association so as to win one of their scholarships through her dancing and with this money leave Brooklyn. Women hold the power in Brown Girl, Brownstones. This is in marked contrast to earlier AfricanAmerican literature, which focused almost exclusively on black men. When female characters appeared in these earlier works, they rarely transcended the stereotype of an African-American woman at the time. Marshall is one of the fi rst novelists to empower her female characters with the autonomy and independence typically granted to men. Though Silla and Selina’s determination is not always admirable, their ambition and drive mark a distinct change in African-American literature. Within the streets of Brooklyn, outside the walls of her brownstone, Selina hears more than her

parents’ arguments. Mrs. Thompson, an elderly hairdresser from the South, is a source of wisdom to Selina. In the beauty salon, Selina fi rst understands her place in a society divided by race and gender. Selina’s Barbadian friend Suggie, a maid in the white suburbs of New York, provides another voice for Selina to consult as she approaches womanhood. Suggie’s calypso dancing and frequent dates entice the young Selina to investigate further both her heritage and her burgeoning sexuality. Many of these characters, including Suggie, speak the same Barbadian dialect and vocabulary Marshall heard as a young girl. From the way in which they use the same adjective twice, such as poor-poor, to emphasize a phrase, to the way in which they employ contrary adjectives such as beautiful-ugly to neutralize a statement’s power, Marshall draws from the words of the kitchen poets she heard as a child. In doing so, she manifests the heritage and identity of her characters through this hybridized Barbadian English, a throwback to another time made modern in Brooklyn. Brown Girl, Brownstones was conceived as the fi rst part of a trilogy that would later include The Chosen Place, the Timeless People and Praisesong for the Widow. None of the characters present in the fi rst novel reappears in the next two. Rather, Marshall continues to explore the same themes of identity, displacement, and reconnection with the past in her next novels, and characters similar to Selina Boyce reinforce these themes. As Selina does, many of Marshall’s characters embark upon a journey to fi nd themselves. But just as Brown Girl, Brownstones chronicles Selina’s journey to womanhood, it also charts her passage from Brooklyn to Barbados. This decision reflects her deceased father’s desires yet is made with the same determination her mother used to keep the family in Brooklyn. At the end of the novel, Selina has become aware of all that has shaped her: her parents’ domestic struggle, the Barbadian Homeowners Association, the racism and sexism aimed at African-American girls, and, most distinctly, a Caribbean heritage she has yet to grasp fully. With an eye toward Barbados and her back toward Brooklyn, she tosses a single silver bangle

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toward the brownstone, not to leave its memory in Brooklyn, but to leave a piece of herself with it.

For Discussion or Writing 1. As Paule Marshall does, Jamaica Kincaid blends historical fact and autobiography. Read Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, thinking about how the protagonist envisions her past, present, and future. Then, write a welldeveloped essay contrasting the two novels’ protagonists. In what ways do these characters change as they pass into womanhood? Can both books be considered coming-of-age novels, the form that in literary studies we call the “bildungsroman”? Why or why not? Also, take into account the relationship the two protagonists have with the culture they know and seek to reconnect with, using specific passages from the novels to support your points. 2. Read Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, comparing the female protagonist with Selina Boyce. In a well-developed essay, explore how both characters inhabit urban spaces while trying to reconcile their current lives with an idealized homeland. 3. The American dream stands at the forefront of many a great American novel, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Compare the vision of the American dream in these novels with the one presented in Brown Girl, Brownstones. How do Marshall’s (and Selina’s) unique background and immigrant status change her portrayal of the American dream? How do Selina’s family’s expectations differ than those of Jay Gatsby or the Joads?

The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969) Though Marshall’s second novel shares no characters with her fi rst, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People begins where Brown Girl, Brownstones ends: with a journey from America to the Caribbean. Unlike Selina Boyce, the Americans in this novel

do not travel to the fictional Bourne Island in search of their heritage. Instead, the novel follows a group of anthropologists sent by the Center of Applied Research, not to discover the island’s past, but to plan its future. Yet, as the novel attests, any planning of Bourne Island’s future is ill conceived without fi rst acknowledging the island’s history: The island is a microcosm of the postcolonial third world; with its sugarcane industry and stratified class structure, it is not far removed from its slave trade days. Just as the island represents colonized countries, the anthropologists assume the role of colonizers. They wish to usher in progress to the people of Bourne Island, but on their own terms. Still, the Americans are not stereotypes of Western imperialism: Saul Amron, a Jewish-American anthropologist, is from a people with a history of suffering; his wife, Harriet, descends from a family who once profited from shipping slaves from the island; and Allen Fuso, a research assistant, identifies more with the island than his native home of America. Soon after their arrival, the group realizes that their efforts to modernize Bourne Island are futile and that only by revisiting the island’s past can its people then see the future. In The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Marshall explores the two themes most emblematic of her work: “the importance of truly confronting the past, both in personal and historical terms, and the necessity of reversing the present order” (“Shaping the World of My Art” 123). The Chosen Place, the Timeless People is Marshall’s only novel set exclusively in the Caribbean. Though Bourne Island is one of several islands situated somewhere between North and South America, it breaks from the other islands and faces east toward “the colossus of Africa,” foreshadowing the African traditions and rituals that are the basis for later sections of the novel (13). Flying over the island for the fi rst time, the Americans observe another significant characteristic of the island’s geography. On this isolated island, a small section of land clashes with the rest of the island’s picturesque scenery: To the west stretched the wide, gently undulating plain with its neatly ordered fields and the

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town poised at its southern edge. To the east and sealed off from that bright green world lay a kind of valley which occupied less than a quarter of the land space on the island. Viewed from the plane, it resembled a ruined amphitheater whose other half had crumbled away and fallen into the sea. (14)

It is in this “ruined amphitheater” that the stage of The Chosen Place, the Timeless People is set. This ravaged land is Bournehills. When it is viewed from above, the Americans notice a large ridge alienating Bournehills and its people from the rest of the island. When it is viewed from below, among the people of the island, the Americans notice further divisions. As with most of Marshall’s characters, the land is a powerful force in shaping the lives and personalities of the people residing on it. The residents of Bournehills are the island’s most poor and oppressed; they form the bottom rung of the class system left over from the island’s time in the slave trade. Above them is the island’s working class, and above both classes are the island’s white businesspeople. Hundreds of years have not broken the bonds once placed on the people of Bournehills. The manner in which the past haunts the people of Bournehills is best expressed in the novel’s epigraph, a saying from the Tiv of West Africa: “Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation but there is no end.” The Americans are quick to perform these “ceremonies of reconciliation”—namely, providing modern technology for the island’s sugarcane industry—but the people of Bournehills are not so quick to forgive. They refuse to use such offerings, even though the machines would ease their burdens in the workplace. Rather, they live their lives in much the same way as the people of Bournehills centuries prior. They cling to such a past; they distrust any move toward the colonization that exploited their ancestors so long ago. Yet, by refusing any sort of change, they remain static characters destined to repeat the past.

The novel’s protagonist, Merle Kinbona, knows the island’s history well: A native of the island, Merle left to study in England, where she also married and had a daughter with a Ugandan student. Her husband left with the daughter for Africa, however, after discovering a secret Merle had kept from him: She was the daughter of a mulatto businessman. Merle, in turn, leaves for Bourne Island when she learns her father is dying. In seeking out her homeland, Merle also seeks herself. Like the land, Merle is divided: She descends from two different races and divides time between two vastly different islands, yet she identifies with her homeland and works to effect change for Bournehills and its people. She realizes what the people of Bournehills do not: that a balance must be struck with modernity in order to guarantee the island’s progress, a balance that preserves the island’s rich heritage. As such, Merle functions as an intercessor between the Americans and the islanders. As a history teacher as well as a native of the island, Merle understands the importance of tradition coupled with social progress and equality. More than any of the novel’s characters, Merle is capable of wedding the island’s past with a more prosperous future. In addition to political change, Merle facilitates personal change. In particular, she forms an intimate bond with Saul in which the two reach a greater self-awareness. As Merle does, Saul begins to realize how important the local customs and rituals are to the people of Bournehills, and the two share similar visions for the island’s development. Saul’s Jewish heritage allows him a more sympathetic view of the islanders, though he can never assimilate into their culture completely. In their relationship, both Saul and Merle heal themselves in order to heal the land, for as Marshall’s novel attests, political change begins with personal revolution. Harriet, of course, does not desire a revolution. With ties to the country’s slave trade, she represents Western imperialism and its often myopic idea of development, which thrives on global technology and abandons local tradition. Harriet views Bournehills as a “mysterious and obscured region

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of the mind which ordinary consciousness did not dare admit to light” (21). Her perception of the foreign land is much the same as Marlow’s upon fi rst entering the Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novella Marshall cites as an early influence. In both works, these ominous descriptions dramatize the oppressor’s fear of the oppressed, a fear of bringing to light what has been cloaked in darkness for so long. Wary of change, the people of Bournehills remain in darkness, unsure of how to reconcile the pain of the past with a progressive future. Yet in their annual reenactment of Cuffee Ned’s slave rebellion, they show themselves desirous of change if not quite capable of it. Every year, they relive their past through Cuffee Ned’s uprising; every year, they witness Cuffee Ned murdering those who enslaved him. If for only a few days a year, the people of Bournehills believe such change is possible. The account of Cuffee Ned reiterates a major theme of the novel, that political change can be and often is ignited by an individual. At the novel’s conclusion, Saul reflects on the possibility of such a change: Because it’s true in a way what everyone’s always saying about the place, that it’s not going to change—at least not on any terms but its own. I’ve come to believe that also. But I felt that if we went about the project the right way we might do some good, if only in helping Bournehills people to feel a little less powerless and forgotten. Then, hopefully, they’d take matters into their own hands. (453)

Saul leaves for America, Merle for Africa, and it is unclear whether the people of Bournehills will rise up and demand the change of which they dream. But at least they dream: Every year, with drums echoing and hands clapping, the people of Bournehills rejoice about what was and will be, and the past seems evermore the present.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a seminal text in understanding the psychology of impe-

rialism. How are the Africans depicted in Conrad’s novel, specifically by Kurtz and Marlow? How are these perceptions similar to or different from the ways the Americans perceive the islanders in Marshall’s novel? Consider particularly ideas of civilization: What does it mean in the Western world to be civilized? Who are the most civilized characters in each novel? 2. Throughout much of her fiction, Marshall uses the automobile as a symbol of Western technology. In The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Vere builds a race car as a status symbol yet is ultimately killed while driving it. How is the car, perhaps more than any other machine, symbolic of Western industrialism? Be sure to consider Marshall’s description of Merle’s Bentley. 3. In the novel, Harriet, whose family once profited from Bourne Island’s slave trade, represents colonizing countries, whereas the residents of Bournehills, who have made little progress from those slave days, represent the colonized. Though such characters seem quite opposite, compare the ways in which Harriet and the people of Bournehills are similar, noting how each refuses to change. Why can or will these characters not change, and what does this mean for their futures? Is one future more promising than the other? 4. Every year the people of Bournehills reenact the slave rebellion of Cuffee Ned. In doing so, they idolize the hero for his actions, yet because of this they fail to see the possibility of change within “ordinary” people like them. In what ways does such hero worship suppress their potential for change? What does Marshall seem to be saying about the relationship between hero worship and social change? By depicting a people who remain stagnant—preferring to live in squalor and remembering the one act of rebellion committed by their ancestors—is Marshall implying that the people of Bournehills need to change the way they venerate Cuffee Ned? Write a well-developed essay in which you take a fi rm stance on this issue, using evidence from the text to support your statements.

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“To Da-duh, in Memoriam” (1976) Surveying the entire body of Marshall’s work, it is easy to see why the author proclaims herself “an unabashed ancestor worshipper” (Reena 95). Her characters seek a past they may have never known, and guiding them back to these earlier times are Marshall’s ancestor figures: Mrs. Thompson in Brown Girl, Brownstones; Leesy Walkes in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; Aunt Cuney and Lebert Joseph in Praisesong for the Widow; and Daduh in the often anthologized short story “To Daduh, in Memoriam.” According to Marshall, this last story is her most autobiographical, inspired by a visit to her grandmother in Barbados at the age of nine. Reminiscing on the year she spent with her grandmother, Marshall likens their relationship to a power struggle: “It was as if we both knew, at a level beyond words, that I had come into the world not only to love her and to continue her line but to take her very life in order that I might live” (95). Da-duh, as do Marshall’s other ancestor figures, encourages a return to traditional values. Yet, while she goes to great lengths to share with her granddaughter all Barbados has to offer, she does so partially out of fear: New York City frightens Daduh, and it is through her granddaughter that she truly realizes the difference between Barbados and the world at large, a discovery the narrator laments only upon reaching adulthood. The tension between Da-duh and her granddaughter, and thus the old and new worlds, is evident in their fi rst encounter. Rather than sharing a conventional greeting, the two challenge each other by locking gazes for an extended period. Da-duh turns away fi rst, dismissing her granddaughter as “one of those New York terrors” (98). Yet, she does not surrender this easily, let alone in her own territory. She leads her granddaughter on a tour of the land, inquiring as to whether or not mango trees and sugarcane can be found in New York: “I said I know you don’t have anything this nice where you come from” (100). Though she momentarily has the upper hand, the old woman is as curious about Brooklyn as the young girl is about Barbados. When she asks the narrator about

snow, the girl seizes her chance to exaggerate what she knows her grandmother has never seen. Afterward, she assaults her grandmother with dances and songs learned on the streets and playgrounds of Brooklyn, appearing to the woman as “a creature from Mars, an emissary from some world she did not know but which intrigued her and whose power she both felt and feared” (102). During their walks about the island, the girl re-creates the myriad technologies within reach of a New Yorker: “refrigerators, radios, gas stoves, elevators, trolley cars, wringer washing machines, movies, airplanes, the cyclone at Coney Island, subways, toasters, electric lights” (103). With each description of this fantastic world, the grandmother weakens a bit. She displays a childlike curiosity about her granddaughter’s world, yet she holds within herself a fear and distrust of technology, much as the people of Bournehills in Marshall’s earlier novel The Chosen Place, the Timeless People do. It is not simply her own world that dissolves in each description of New York, but a world wherein past generations walked, not below buildings, but between rows of sugarcane. A source of pride for Da-duh, these canes intimidate the granddaughter just as the buildings frighten the grandmother. In each case, the foreign world looms large in each character’s mind, forcing her to consider worlds outside her own. In a fi nal showdown, the two trek deep into the gully, where Da-duh displays to her granddaughter a single tree towering above the rest. She implores the girl to tell her whether New York City claims anything so tall. Her granddaughter tells Da-duh of the many buildings rising high over New York, specifically the Empire State Building, which was at that time “the tallest in the world” (104). Da-duh refuses to believe and even raises a hand as if to strike her granddaughter before the girl promises to send a postcard of the building upon her return home. As Marshall’s character Avey Johnson discovers in Praisesong for the Widow, the industrial world hides the natural world and prevents its residents from experiencing a connection and bond with the land. After hearing of New York’s buildings,

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Da-duh does not see the canes and trees in front of her, for “Some huge, monolithic shape had imposed itself, it seemed, between her and the land, obstructing her vision” (104). It is not simply the land Da-duh can no longer see, but the entire culture that thrived upon it. In realizing the difference between the old world and the new, between the traditional and the modern, Da-duh envisions herself as a dying person and soon takes ill. When English planes fly low over the island to intimidate strikers, everyone but Da-duh flees into the sugarcane. When they return, they fi nd Da-duh dead. Such an overwhelming display of technology validates her fears, and she passes away as a relic of a time forever spoiled, its innocence lost within the machines of the world. In the story’s fi nal paragraph, the narrator remembers her grandmother from an adult perspective as an artist in downtown New York: She died and I lived, but always, to this day even, within the shadow of her death. For a brief period after I was grown I went to live alone, like one doing penance, in a loft above a noisy factory in downtown New York and there painted seas of sugar-cane and huge swirling Van Gogh suns and palm trees striding like brightly-plumed Tutsi warriors across a tropical landscape, while the thunderous tread of the machines downstairs jarred the floor beneath my easel, mocking my efforts. (106)

As an adult living in New York—a place both geographically and culturally distant from the Caribbean—the narrator, much as Selina Boyce does in Brown Girl, Brownstones, seeks to reconnect with the land of her ancestors. Yet, technology and industrialism prevent her from experiencing a connection with the natural world, just as they did with Da-duh. Upon her fi rst trip to Barbados, the narrator was intimidated by the Caribbean landscape and “longed then for the familiar” (99). By painting the world of Barbados, she attempts to lessen the feeling of separation between her and the land of her ancestors. Still, she cannot escape the modern world, though she tries. As an adult,

the narrator realizes the difficulty in preserving one’s traditional values and heritage in a world bereft of magic, where skyscrapers shoot from land where trees once stood.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In Marshall’s fiction, the Caribbean landscape takes on a mythic quality. While the narrator of “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” is enthralled by the unfamiliar sights of Barbados, Da-duh is equally curious about Brooklyn. Write a well-developed essay exploring the mythic dimensions of Daduh’s Caribbean world and the narrator’s Brooklyn. In what ways are the girl’s descriptions of the city mythic to Da-duh? What values do these mythic representations seem to suggest? Does Marshall leave readers with any sense that these respective sets of values can be reconciled? 2. Marshall frequently uses sugarcane to symbolize the past to which Da-duh clings. Marshall’s use of this imagery is intriguing, as sugarcane was introduced to the Caribbean by Europeans and harvested by African slaves under horrific conditions. Similarly, the narrator of Marshall’s short story carries the technological marvels of New York to the island, culminating in Daduh’s death. In a well-developed essay, compare Marshall’s depiction of encroaching technology with her treatment of the subject in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, noting the historical significance of sugarcane. Is Da-duh’s reticence the same as that of the people of Bournehills? Though Da-duh boasts of the island’s staple crop and takes comfort in its presence, is it so different from the buildings of which her granddaughter speaks or the development the anthropologists plan for Bourne Island? 3. It is clear toward the end of “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” that the narrator is lamenting the loss of her own innocence as well as her grandmother’s death. Compare the narrator’s perception of Da-duh as a child and as an adult. How does the narrator’s memory of her grandmother change with age? What does Marshall accomplish by equating Caribbean traditions with the narrator’s youth?

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Praisesong for the Widow (1983) A winner of the American Book Award, Praisesong for the Widow is often considered Marshall’s fi nest and most widely read work. The novel makes up the last of a trilogy that started with Brown Girl, Brownstones, followed by The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. Not surprisingly, the novel again charts a journey. At the age of 64, Avey Johnson is much older than Selina Boyce and Merle Kinbona, the protagonists of the trilogy’s earlier novels. Yet, as these women do, Avey travels to the Caribbean to fi nd herself, to discover pieces of herself long since gone. Avey does not hail from the area, as Selina and Merle do, but traces her connection with the Caribbean to a tale heard as a child: On Tatem Island, off the coast of South Carolina, Avey’s great-aunt Cuney related to her the history of the Ibo, a group of African people who, after being taken to those very same shores as slaves, turned and walked across the water back to their homeland. Through her tales of the Ibo, Cuney instilled in Avey an appreciation for a culture that sprung from the same continent as her ancestors’. Later in life, however, the adult Avey forgets her aunt and the stories she told, turning away from her African roots in favor of the American dream. After her husband’s death and literally sickened by her current lifestyle, Avey boards a cruise to the Caribbean in hopes of reconnecting not just with the Ibo but with African culture in its entirety. In the fi nal entry of her trilogy, Marshall proves herself a mapmaker of the African diaspora, charting the geographic and spiritual journeys of her characters with the aid of an African legend. The Ibo people of the legend are important characters in the novel, for they represent the reconnection with Africa that Avey seeks. Having foreseen all the hardships that would befall them in America, they walked across the ocean back to their homeland, despite being bound in heavy chains. Though she is not literally imprisoned, Avey also suffers in America. Early in her marriage, Avey badgered her husband into fi nancial pursuits, despite being happy otherwise. As a result, her husband, Jay, dedicated the rest of his life to acquiring wealth and status, and the couple’s marriage

suffered as a result. Avey’s visit to the Caribbean after her husband’s death represents her desire to identify again with her culture, as fi rst described to her by her great-aunt, Cuney. To do so, Avey must abandon all of the luxuries and comforts of the life she shared with her husband. At fi rst, Avey’s return to her roots is not a conscious decision but a subconscious reaction. On board the cruise ship, she becomes sick after eating a parfait in the ship’s posh Versailles Room. The name of the ship, the Bianca Pride, translates into English as “white pride.” Similarly, Avey lives in a middle-class New York suburb called White Plains. Avey’s mind and body are fi nally reacting against the white culture she has consumed for so long. In these references to white culture, Marshall is not disparaging the culture of another race but showing the effects of ignoring one’s own culture for economic reasons. Not unlike Silla and Deighton Boyce in Brown Girl, Brownstones, Avey and Jay struggle to get by in a Brooklyn apartment, a source of arguments over money. But, whereas Deighton Boyce refuses to accept the American dream and its promises of wealth and success, Jay pursues it, if only in response to his wife’s longings. During the fi rst years of their marriage, Avey and Jay lived in Harlem, an area vastly different from the white suburbs they would later inhabit. It was here Avey encountered many modes of black experience: Negro spirituals on the weekends, her husband’s reciting the poetry of Langston Hughes, jazz and blues music. In addition to their time in Harlem, the two made an annual pilgrimage to Tatem Island, the grounds upon which the Ibo myth took place. These trips to Tatem Island ceased with Jay’s new approach to life, one exclusively focused on material possessions. In one of the novel’s more poignant passages, Avey remembers not crying at Jay’s funeral because she believed her husband died many years prior. In his wake Jerome Johnson emerged, a slave to materialism and status, concerned more with what others think of him and his possessions than the culture upon which his life and marriage were initially founded. In addition to remembering the early days of her marriage, Avey dreams of her great-aunt Cuney

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and is plagued by memories of her childhood. These dreams and memories are symptoms of Avey’s sickness. To illustrate Avey’s vertigo further, Marshall often employs a stream-of-consciousness technique, much like of that the modernists James Joyce and William Faulkner. The past haunts Avey, and yet she knows it was only during this time that she was ever happy. She leaves her friends aboard the ship and walks alone along a beach, thinking of her past. When she meets Lebert Joseph, an owner of a rum shop, Avey is given a chance to acknowledge this past in a ceremony called the Carriacou Excursion, a trip to the island of Carriacou to honor the island’s ancestors. Lebert is something of an authority on these “Old Parents” and asks Avey from which African nation she comes (165). Though Lebert rattles off a long list of nations— Arada, Cromanti, Yarraba, Moko, Temne, Manding—Avey cannot name the nation of her descent. In taking Avey, an “out-islander,” on the trip to Carriacou, Lebert intends to reunite her with her nation, for he knows well the importance of knowing one’s ancestry: “They can turn your life around in a minute, you know. All of a sudden everything start gon’ wrong and you don’ know the reason. You can’t figger it out all you try. Is the Old Parents, oui” (165). Over the course of the novel, Lebert introduces Avey to her heritage and thus heals her of her sickness. Though Avey is not familiar with the dances and rituals on Carriacou, they remind her of her days in Harlem and the sense of community among the other African Americans in the city. Overwhelmed by emotion at the Dance of Nations, Avey joins the dance even though she is an “out-islander” who does not know her heritage. The dance is natural for Avey; she remembers doing similar dances on the shores of Tatem Island with her great-aunt Cuney. After seeing Avey dance, Lebert is sure that she descends from the Arada people of Africa. Of course, Avey will never know for sure; she is too far removed and displaced from her “Old Parents.” Yet, through Lebert and the Dance of Nations, Avey reconnects, not with her specific heritage, but with her African roots in general. After the dance, Avey once again goes by the name her great-aunt Cuney

gave her so long ago: Avatara. Because she does not claim a specific people but rather the entire continent of Africa, Avey represents all people displaced from Africa, whether they live in Carriacou, Tatem Island, or Harlem. Though Marshall celebrates her Caribbean heritage in her life and work, she proves herself a pan-Africanist in Praisesong for the Widow, honoring all people displaced from Africa. Upon returning to the States, Avey—now Avatara—intends to share her experience with others removed from Africa, envisioning herself as a wild woman shouting wisdom to a younger generation. She wishes to unify all of these displaced people under a single black heritage consisting of many different nations and cultures. Though she will never know which nation she belongs to, Avatara ultimately identifies with the continent of Africa as a whole. As do Selina Boyce of Brown Girl, Brownstones and Merle Kinbona of The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, Avey Johnson embarks upon a search for herself in the lands of her people. At the novel’s end, Avatara remembers something her great-aunt Cuney said of her grandmother: “Her body she always usta say might be in Tatem but her mind, her mind was long gone with the Ibos” (254–255).

For Discussion or Writing 1. A distinguishing characteristic of the Ibo people is their ability to see into the past and future. As a result, they see time in a cyclical, rather than linear, fashion. Read One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. Though Marshall and García Márquez have markedly different styles, the view of time presented in these two novels is very similar. Write a well-developed essay exploring this cyclical view of time, noting any differences you fi nd. How does Avey see time in a cyclical fashion? What do her recurring dreams and memories suggest of her perception of time? How do these novelists incorporate a cyclical view of time into their narratives? 2. Read Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “To the Diaspora.” In a well-developed essay, compare Avey’s journey and psychological transformation

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with the speaker of Brooks’s poem, noting especially its first two lines, “When you set out for Afrika / you did not know you were going” (1–2). Though Avey never reaches Africa, how can her experience be seen as emblematic of all people displaced from the continent?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MARSHALL AND HER WORK 1. Alice Walker and Paule Marshall both wrote about how African-American women have inspired their writings. Walker does so in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” while Marshall explores similar issues in “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Walker and Marshall write about identity, the way they have learned to understand themselves through African culture. First, read these essays and think about how they relate to each other. Then read the short story “Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston. Finally, write a well-developed essay that explores how Hurston’s story can be understood more fully by applying the ideas of Walker and Marshall. Be sure to cite both essays and the Hurston text. 2. Read the following essay, which deals with Paule Marshall and Doris Lessing and the way they write about fashion: http://www. americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/ fall_2006/pezzulich.htm. After analyzing the article, assess its worth in understanding these two diverse writers. Are the comparisons apt? How does a pop-culture approach to both writers facilitate our understanding? 3. As a child, Marshall read many Victorian novels, of which Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a noted example. Compare the struggles and eventual transformation of Brontë’s protagonist with these of Selina Boyce in Brown Girl, Brownstones, noting each author’s portrayal of race, class, and wealth. Write a well-developed essay that discusses how Brown Girl, Brownstones may or may not have been informed by this novel.

4. As does Praisesong for the Widow, A LEX H ALEY’s epic novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family concerns itself with the search for origins. In his novel, Haley tries to provide a grand ancestral narrative, “a symbolic saga of all African-descent people,” by following the trials of his own family from his ancestor Kunta’s abduction in Ghana by slave traders up through the Civil Rights movement. Marshall, on the other hand, does not provide such an easy answer for Avey, who ends her journey without knowing the specific nation of her descent. In a well-developed essay, explore the merits of these author’s respective approaches. Is Marshall’s depiction of Avey’s search for origins, which ends in an embracing of all that is Africa, more powerful? 5. Like Marshall, the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay traced his ancestry to both the Caribbean (Jamaica) and Africa. In “The Tropics of New York,” the city’s fruit vendors remind the poem’s speaker of “fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, / And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies / In benediction over nunlike hills” (6–8). Read some of McKay’s poetry or his short memoir that chronicles his childhood, My Green Hills of Jamaica. Write a welldeveloped essay that compares these authors’ respective biographies with their depictions of Caribbean life and culture. Do McKay and Marshall have a similar picture of Caribbean life? How does McKay’s childhood in Jamaica, or his leftist political views, affect his poetry and prose? How do Marshall’s upbringing and concern with fi nding a satisfactory cultural identity make her work different from McKay’s? 6. In many of Marshall’s works, her semiautobiographical protagonists assume a sort of panAfrican identity, in which youth, the natural world, and ancestral tradition are lost in the maelstrom of the present. In a well-developed essay, consider “To Da-duh, in Memoriam” and Praisesong for the Widow as attempts to sal-

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vage the past. In these works, Marshall seems to be engaged in a project not dissimilar to that of the romantic poet William Wordsworth, who tried to recapture the essence of youth in order to explore our experience of the natural world without the prejudices acquired by our entrance into the adult world. Read some of Wordsworth’s poetry, especially “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” and compare his characterization of his experiences as a boy with Marshall’s description of Da-duh’s world and Avey’s ecstatic experiences at the end of Praisesong. What attitudes do these respective authors have toward the past, nature, and childhood? After reading their works, would you consider Marshall to be a romantic? WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Billingslea-Brown, Alma J. Crossing Borders through Folklore: African-American Women’s Fiction and Art. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Brownley, Martine W. Deferrals of Domain: Contemporary Women Novelists and the State. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Christian, Barbara. “Ritualistic Process and the Structure of Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Callaloo 6 (Spring–Summer 1983): 74–84. Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. DeLamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. ———. “Women, Silence, and History in The Chosen Place, the Timeless People.” Callaloo 16 (Winter 1993): 227–242. Denniston, Dorothy H. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

Elia, Nada. Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives. New York: Garland, 2001. Gadsby, Meredith. Sucking Salt: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Marshall, Paule. “Audio Interview with Don Swaim.” wiredforbooks.org. Available online. URL: http:// wiredforbooks.org/paulemarshall/index.htm. Accessed July 4, 2007. ———. Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York: Random House, 1959. ———. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. ———. Daughters. New York: Atheneum, 1991. ———. The Fisher King: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2000. ———. “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” New York Times Book Review, January 9, 1983. Available online. URL: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.htm l?res=9F02E3DC1238F93AA35752C0A96594826 0 &sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1. Accessed July 4, 2007. ———. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Putnam, 1983. ———. Reena and Other Stories. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1983. ———. “Shaping the World of My Art.” New Letters 40 (Autumn 1973): 97–112. ———. Soul Clap Hands and Sing. New York: Atheneum, 1961. Pettis, Joyce. Toward a Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. “Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color: Paule Marshall.” University of Minnesota. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/ marshall_paule.html. Accessed July 4, 2007.

Daniel Hartis

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) The social drama . . . is the drama of the whole man. It seeks to deal with his differences from others not per se, but toward the end that, if only through drama, we may know how much the same we are, for if we lose that knowledge we shall have nothing left at all. (“On Social Plays”)

B

est known for a handful of plays he composed between 1947 and 1955, Arthur Miller was an accomplished dramatist, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, whose career spanned six decades. Among the most recognizable figures in 20th-century American letters, Miller was also famous for his sensational marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his leftist political beliefs, and his altercations with U.S. government officials. During the 1950s and 1960s, his public opposition to American red scare tactics made him an icon of political counterculture, giving him as much notoriety as his literary and dramatic works. Today, with cold war fears a relic of America’s past, Miller’s legacy rests, not on his political posturing, but on his contributions to the American stage. Together with his contemporary TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Miller altered traditional conceptions about tragedy, broadening its scope to include the “common man.” Miller’s best works reveal how society intervenes, as cosmic forces do in ancient Greek tragedies, to produce inescapable and devastating consequences, not only for individuals, but also for families and communities. In his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Miller explains, “If the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it” (Theater Essays 3–4).

The second child of Isidore Miller and Augusta Barnett, Arthur Asher Miller was born in New York City on October 17, 1915, into a well-to-do Jewish family. Miller’s father emigrated from Poland at age six and, without learning how to read, established a successful garment manufacturing firm. Just before the stock market crash in 1929, his business, the Miltex Coat and Suit Company, employed a thousand workers. Miller’s mother was a fi rst-generation American, also of Polish descent. Miller spent his youth and early adolescence in a large apartment overlooking Central Park, but when the Great Depression wiped out the family’s savings and decimated Miltex, the Miller clan relocated to a small Brooklyn apartment, where the young Arthur shared a tiny bedroom with his maternal grandfather. The change in fortune took a heavy toll. Accustomed to luxury, Augusta grew bitter, and without the business success on which his identity was staked, Isidore struggled with depression. Although Miller’s parents’ marriage survived, a constant tension lingered between them. The gloomy household atmosphere left a lasting impression on Miller; his work frequently examines the psychological strain individuals and families endure when their dreams collapse. For Miller, as for other writers of his era, the depression was an important turning point in his social consciousness, a revelation that demonstrated how important economic systems are to the identity of Americans.

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Although affected by the Great Depression’s toll on American life, Miller did not write about it during adolescence. Attending James Madison High and later transferring to Abraham Lincoln High, Miller was, at best, a mediocre student: He placed a low priority on education, excelling in athletics rather than academics. To help make ends meet, he worked several odd jobs before graduating in June 1933. That year, he applied to the University of Michigan but was rejected for poor grades. During the next application cycle, while clerking at an auto-parts warehouse, Miller wrote a letter to University of Michigan administrators requesting the reconsideration of his application. His perseverance paid off, and he was accepted on a probationary basis, matriculating in the 1934 autumn semester. Miller thrived in Ann Arbor. With a reputation for both academic excellence and political radicalism, the University of Michigan shaped his career. He discovered a latent writing talent while working for the school newspaper, the Michigan Daily, for which he covered, among other issues, the creation of the United Auto Workers union. Journalism provided Miller an opportunity to use his developing intellect to investigate and analyze the working class, with whom he identified throughout his life. After reading the works of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Henrik Ibsen, Miller began writing creatively, hoping to translate his nascent social and political views onto the stage. In 1936, he wrote his fi rst play, No Villain, which won Michigan’s prestigious Hopwood Award. By the time Miller graduated in June 1938, he had won a second Hopwood for Honors at Dawn and a competition sponsored by the Theater Guild for They Too Arise. Between 1938 and 1944, Miller continued to develop his craft. Hired out of college by the Federal Theatre and Federal Writer’s Projects, a government-sponsored collective with a reputation for harboring communist sympathizers, Miller became a victim of politically motivated cutbacks, losing the job within months. Two years later, he married his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, with whom he had two children, Jane and Robert. As he settled into family life, World War

II engulfed Europe. Because of a high school football injury, Miller was exempted from service. His Jewish heritage, coupled with his growing social conscience, left him searching for a way to contest anti-Semitism, which had reached a fevered pitch both at home and abroad. Much as the depression did, the specter of Nazism preoccupied Miller for the rest of his career. In the six years following Miller’s college graduation, he experimented with different genres, writing several radio plays, a failed fi lm script, a journalistic account of American soldiers preparing for World War II (Situation Normal, 1944), and a novel, The Man Who Had All the Luck. The story of a man unable to enjoy his unlimited good fortune, The Man Who Had All the Luck examines what Miller calls “the law of life,” namely, that “people are always frustrated in some important regard” (Theater Essays 125). Unable to fi nd a publisher for the novel, he rewrote it for the stage. On November 23, 1944, The Man Who Had All the Luck, Miller’s fi rst professionally produced play, opened at New York’s Forrest Theatre. The success of seeing his work on Broadway was short lived; scathing reviews and poor turnout limited the play’s run to four performances. Disillusioned by the negative reception, Miller swore never to write another play. Instead, he returned to prose fiction, publishing Focus, a commercially successful novel about anti-Semitism, in 1945. After completing Focus, Miller regained the courage to write for the stage, vowing to quit for good should his next effort fail. Equipped with a self-imposed ultimatum, Miller changed his approach to playwriting, aiming to appeal to a mass audience. Accustomed to composing plays in a few weeks, Miller spent two years writing All My Sons, which premiered at the Coronet Theatre on January 29, 1947. Reviews were mixed, but the New York Times, the city’s most influential newspaper, affi rmed Miller’s talent: “All My Sons is an honest, forceful drama, an original play of superior quality by a playwright who knows his craft.” Audiences agreed. Under Elia Kazan’s direction, All My Sons ran for 328 performances and earned many of Broadway’s most prestigious honors, including the

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Donaldson, Tony, and Drama Critics Circle Awards. Set in post–World War II middle America, All My Sons focuses on a family. In the serene atmosphere of an upper-middle-class backyard, the family patriarch and aging factory owner Joe Keller witnesses the unraveling of his “normal” life when his wife and son acknowledge Keller’s dirty secret that he knowingly sold defective airplane engines to the military, causing the death of 21 American pilots. Faced with the enormity of his crime and unable to regain his family’s trust, Keller commits suicide. All My Sons marked a departure for Miller, not only giving him his fi rst taste of success, but also ushering him into his mature period as a writer. Widely considered his fi rst structurally sound play, All My Sons owes much to the 19th-century Norwegian playwright Ibsen, who introduced theatergoers to social realism. As does All My Sons, Ibsen’s most celebrated dramas progress in a linear direction; depict rational, photographically rendered characters; and advocate social reform. Written in common language and stripped of psychological complexity, All My Sons achieved what Miller intended, namely, to make tragedy accessible to a nonspecialized, working-class audience. In his early years, Miller theorized, “The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost,” his metaphor for the way the past returns, not only haunting us but also affecting our present lives (Theater Essays 179). In his early works, Miller failed to put his theory into practice, often creating convoluted structures that, while they appealed to academics, did not necessarily connect with a common audience. However, with All My Sons he crafts a play with a clear, easy-to-follow structure, enabling a larger audience to appreciate his art. As Steven R. Centola writes, Miller’s breakthrough occurred when he learned to create “dramatic action that, by its very movement—by its creation, suspension, and resolution of tension; its inexorable rush toward tragic confrontation—proves that the past is always present and cannot be ignored, forgotten, or denied” (Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller 50). After All My Sons, Miller found himself in unfamiliar territory. In just a few months, his literary reputation had skyrocketed. Within a year, he was

considered one of America’s most promising young playwrights. Yet, feeling as if he had exhausted the “Greco-Ibsen form,” he longed to make a unique stamp on the theater. The result was Death of a Salesman, which premiered at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949. As does Joe Keller, the Salesman protagonist, Willy Loman, commits suicide when past failures become unbearable. Unlike All My Sons, Death of a Salesman combines present action with interior monologue and psychological confusion, weaving past and present into a tapestry of misguided optimism and false hope. Abandoning the linear progression of his earlier dramas, Miller explores the collapse of the American dream in a collage of fabricated memories and irrational convictions. Routinely cited as the greatest 20thcentury American play, Salesman was an immediate and lasting success. Its initial Broadway run lasted 742 performances and netted all the major New York drama awards as well as the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to the original production, the play has enjoyed three critically acclaimed Broadway revivals—in 1975, 1984, and 1999, starring, respectively, George C. Scott, Dustin Hoffman, and Brian Dennehy. Miller was a staunch critic of U.S. capitalism throughout his life. Beginning in his Michigan days, he defended socialism as an alternative to what he considered a dehumanizing socioeconomic American landscape. As the depression faded and the United States regained its economic footing, the American socialist movement lost its momentum. Meanwhile, with cold war tensions erupting, many Americans, both inside and outside government, branded communist sympathizers as traitors. Between 1949 and 1954, the red scare dominated Miller’s career. In 1950, he wrote an adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, the tale of a man whose neighbors ostracize him for opposing an unethical town proposal, despite its economic benefits. In the preface to the published text, Miller argued that the play’s chief concern is “the central theme of our social life today. . . . It is the question of whether the democratic guarantees protecting political minorities ought to be set aside in time of crisis. More personally, it is the question of whether one’s

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vision of the truth ought to be a source of guilt at a time when the mass of men condemn it as a dangerous and devilish lie” (Theater Essays 17). In Miller’s next major project, The Crucible (1953), the hero, John Proctor, chooses to die rather than falsely accuse others of witchcraft. Disguised as a period piece about the 1692 Salem witch trials, The Crucible is an allegory for the communist witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 1950s, especially the McCarthy hearings. The play premiered just months after Miller and Elia Kazan had a falling out. The two had worked closely on a number of projects, including All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and a failed screenplay, The Hook. In a 1952 hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Kazan revealed the names of several communist sympathizers, many of whom Miller knew. After Kazan and Miller cut ties, Kazan directed On the Waterfront (1954), a fi lm in which the lead character incriminates several corrupt mob bosses. Shortly afterward, Miller wrote A View from the Bridge (1954). Set in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as On the Waterfront, Bridge features a character, Eddie Carbone, whose community ostracizes him for betraying their code of silence. Compared with All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, neither The Crucible nor A View from the Bridge fared well at the box office. Reviews were mixed; their combined Broadway runs amounted to fewer than 350 performances, a disappointment for a playwright of Miller’s stature. Over the next few decades, audience appreciation of these neglected plays grew. Frequently performed throughout the world, both plays remain in the active repertory. Over the next decade, Miller lived in the public spotlight. Off the stage, 1956 was an eventful year for him. In the span of one month, he divorced Mary Slattery, married Marilyn Monroe, and testified before HUAC. True to John Proctor’s example, Miller refused to “name names.” Fortunately, Miller did not face Proctor’s fate: Convicted of contempt in federal district court the following year, he was forced to pay a fi ne and sentenced to one month in jail. The conviction was overturned on appeal. In 1957, Viking published Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, which included an original intro-

duction still considered required reading for drama students. At the time, however, Miller had turned his attentions away from the stage. He set his sights on Hollywood, where he wrote the screenplay for The Misfits, a fi lm starring Monroe and Clark Gable. During production, his marriage collapsed. Within a week of The Misfits’s February 1, 1961, release, Monroe was granted a divorce. A year later, Miller married Inga Morath. The couple had two children: Rebecca, now a successful fi lmmaker, and Daniel, who was born with Down syndrome and committed to a home for the mentally retarded, about whom Miller never spoke in public. After a nine-year hiatus from playwriting, Miller produced After the Fall in 1964, an expressionistic exploration of denial, guilt, and the Holocaust. The play ran for 59 performances at New York’s Lincoln Center, inciting controversy for its portrayal of Maggie, the female lead, whom many considered a Monroe replica. Several commentators thought Miller was exploiting his now-deceased former wife, who had overdosed on sleeping pills in 1962. Miller followed After the Fall with Incident at Vichy (1964), another examination of the Holocaust. As its predecessor, Vichy was met with mixed reviews and low audience turnout. In 1968, with his career on a two-decade decline, Miller enjoyed his greatest success since Death of a Salesman with The Price, which premiered on February 7 and ran for 429 performances. The story of two brothers who dredge up their personal histories in order to sort out their recently deceased father’s estate, The Price revisits a favorite Miller theme, namely, the inseparability of past and present. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Miller was actively involved in politics. He spoke frequently in opposition to the Vietnam War, attended the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention, and, as the president of PEN, advocated the release of imprisoned writers. As a writer, Miller remained productive until he died, but after The Price he never wrote another Broadway hit. In 1987 he published Timebends: A Life, in which, in addition to reflecting on his literary and political career, he openly discussed his marriage to Monroe for the fi rst time. Broken Glass, a 1994 play about Jewish

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persecution in pre–World War II Europe, was Miller’s greatest late-career achievement. Nominated for a Tony, it was even more popular in England, where it won London’s coveted Olivier Award as best new play. In 1996, Miller wrote an Academy Award–nominated screen adaptation of The Crucible. Nearly a decade later, when Miller was 88 years old, he completed his aptly titled fi nal play, Finishing the Picture (2004). On February 10, 2005, Miller succumbed to congestive heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.

Death of a Salesman (1949) After a trial run in Philadelphia, Death of a Salesman premiered on February 10, 1949, at New York’s Morosco Theatre. Miller’s most successful Broadway play, Salesman had a run of 742 performances. Within a year of its debut, it had found the stage in every major U.S. city. Salesman swept the major American drama awards, garnering Miller his second Tony, Donaldson, and Drama Critics Circle Awards, as well as his fi rst and only Pulitzer Prize. Though he would go on to write a handful of successful works in his later career, Miller never again matched the critical acclaim he received for Salesman; however, as other works from the mid20th century have lost favor with drama critics and theatergoers, Salesman’s luster has yet to fade. According to the Miller scholar Brenda Murphy, “since its premiere, there has never been a time when Death of a Salesman was not being performed somewhere in the world” (70). In two acts, neither of which contains scene breaks, Death of a Salesman dramatizes the last two days of Willy Loman’s life. With his career and sanity on the decline, Willy, a lifelong traveling salesman, returns to his Brooklyn home “tired to the death,” unable to make his New England sales calls. As his wife, Linda, comforts him, their two adult sons, Biff and Happy, both home for a brief stay, discuss Willy’s unstable mood, odd behavior, and propensity for talking to himself. Seamlessly shifting between past and present, Act 1 fi lls in the family’s history and develops the play’s principal

characters. Willy, at best a mediocre salesman in his younger days, has become so inept he must borrow money from his neighbor, Charley, to pay his mortgage and monthly life insurance premium. Meanwhile, Linda suppresses fears of fi nancial collapse, wearing a cheerful mask in order to buoy Willy’s fragile self-esteem. Biff, having long ago rejected his father’s yes-man approach to business success, has nothing to show for two decades of working “twenty or thirty different kinds of jobs.” His dreams vanished in high school when he flunked 12th-grade math, nullifying his University of Virginia football scholarship. Conversely, Happy earns a good living in the business world, but neither the money nor his frequent one-night stands satisfy him. Act 1 rises and falls in a series of waves. Willy oscillates between hope and despair, truth and lies, self-confidence and self-doubt. He boasts that he’s “very well liked” throughout New England, then confesses, “I’m not noticed. . . . I’m fat. I’m very foolish to look at.” As his odds for personal success fade, Willy seeks solace in Biff’s achievements. Willy fondly recalls Biff’s football glory, reveling in his son’s adolescent charisma and popularity. Yet, Biff’s adult failures haunt and confound Willy. In the same breath, he chastises Biff as a “lazy bum,” then lauds his work ethic: “There’s one thing about Biff—he’s not lazy.” The disjunction between Willy’s imagined Biff and the Biff the audience encounters underscores the rift between Willy’s reality and everyone else’s. It also foreshadows Willy’s absurd demise. As all tragic heroes do, Willy gropes for immortality. He wants others to remember him, but as he grows older, he realizes that his middling sales career will not suffice. Thus, he turns to his older son, hoping Biff will continue his legacy. For 16 years Willy has longed for Biff to triumph where Willy failed, to parlay his youthful charm into fi nancial success. Act 1 concludes on a hopeful crescendo, as Biff promises to seek a loan from his former boss in order to start a sporting goods company. As the curtain rises on Act 2, Willy wakes refreshed, soothed in his hope that Biff will fi nally settle down in New York. Biff and Happy have

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already left for the city, and Willy looks forward to a celebratory steak dinner that evening with his sons. Before the three gather at the restaurant, Willy stops by company headquarters to request a local assignment, pleading exhaustion from spending 34 years on the road. Willy’s boss, Howard, wrecks Willy’s optimistic mood, not only rejecting the request, but fi ring him for lack of production. In need of money, Willy drops by Charley’s office to ask for another loan. There he meets Bernard— Charley’s son and Biff’s boyhood friend—now a successful lawyer, who reminds Willy of Biff’s failures. Agitated, confused, and despondent, Willy joins Biff and Happy at Frank’s Chop House, the setting for most of Act 2. Having failed to secure a loan for his newfangled business scheme, Biff determines to break family tradition by telling his father the truth. Biff’s meeting with Bill Oliver sparks an epiphany, which he divulges to Happy: “He gave me one look and I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been! We’ve been talking in a dream for fi fteen years.” Biff’s proclamation resonates on two levels, not only indicting his family’s fallacious communication habits, but also revealing the hollow foundation on which the American dream is built. In this context, “dream” is stripped of its optimistic, idealistic connotations. Instead, the term signifies unreality, the depletion of meaning, and the inability to escape the past. Sensing that Biff’s insight negates his own life, Willy refuses to listen, losing himself in another reverie. He recalls an evening 15 years earlier when Biff traveled to Boston to confess flunking out of school only to discover Willy with a mistress. The incident clarifies Willy’s paternal inadequacy and explains Biff’s demoralized demeanor. The play’s action builds toward an event that has already occurred, an episode illuminating the central characters’ motives and convictions. In a creative twist, Miller inverts conventional dramatic progression, in which time unfolds linearly, unleashing a climactic accumulation of past events. Conversely, Salesman’s present action—that is, the fi nal 24 hours of Willy’s life—climaxes in a scene set a decade and a half in the past. Biff’s adolescent insight—that his father is a “phony little fake”—is

the logical precursor of his present epiphany, namely, that he too has led a phony, fake existence. The scene occurs in Willy’s mind, making the epiphany Willy’s as well as Biff’s. Willy’s daydream prepares the audience for the play’s inevitable confrontation, Biff’s last-ditch effort to force his father to “hear the truth.” With the declaration “I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you,” Biff begs Willy to “take that phony dream and burn it,” a plea with a twofold meaning: Just as he wants Willy to free the family from the shackles of the American dream, Biff yearns for Willy to escape the waking dreams that dominate his life and embrace tangible, present reality. On one level, Biff’s appeal moves Willy, who exclaims, “Isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!” On a deeper level, however, Willy misses Biff’s point, retreating almost immediately into fantasy, telling his imaginary brother how Biff, when given the $20,000 life insurance payout, will become a magnificent success. Shortly thereafter, Willy drives wildly into the night, presumably to commit suicide. After Act 2, a short requiem documents the Loman family’s grief. Set at Willy’s graveside, the fi nal scene closes on a sentimental note as Linda tells her dead husband, “I made the last payment on the house today. . . . And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free. . . . We’re free.” Although Miller had employed elements of realism in his early plays, Death of a Salesman was his fi rst original contribution to the form. A term denoting any literary work about the everyday existence of lower-class people, realism, according to William Harmon and Hugh Holman, usually focuses on “the immediate, the here and now, the specific action, and the verifiable consequence” (Harman 428). Unlike Miller’s previous play, All My Sons—a paean to the renowned realist Henrik Ibsen—Death of a Salesman stretches the boundaries of traditional realism. As his surname indicates, Willy is a low man. With their unadorned speech and working-class struggles, the Loman family’s life exemplifies the realistic subject. Yet, Salesman departs from “immediate, here and now” storytelling. Instead, oscillating between past and present, between external action and internal thought, the

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play prompts audiences to reconsider what “realistic” means. Through the Lomans’ story, Miller demonstrates how memory and reflection are as “real” as tangible stimuli. Were the audience not privy to Willy’s consciousness, Salesman could not have succeeded in exposing what Miller considered the American dream’s “real” consequences. Salesman fuses several thematic issues, but none is more crucial than the control American cultural values exert on individuals’ psyches. Willy’s hopes and fears are social creations. Principles embodied within the American mythos—self-reliance, economic salvation, individual freedom—create Willy’s identity. Cleft from these values, Willy is an empty shell. In the fi nal confrontation, Biff eviscerates not only everything Willy considers meaningful, but also the distinction between American “reality” and American mythology. Immediately after Salesman’s premier, critics began debating the play’s tragic merits. Traditional conceptions of tragedy limit the form to stories about noble characters undone by fate or inherent psychological flaws. In Poetics, Aristotle hypothesized that by viewing tragedies, audiences experienced an emotional cleansing of pity and fear. Thomas Hardy called tragedy the “worthy encompassed by the inevitable.” Salesman is plainly tragic in the colloquial sense: The Loman family suffers several personal misfortunes, including the needless death of its patriarch. Some scholars, however, suggest that Willy lacks the nobility and “worthiness” to assume the hero’s mantle; therefore, his story is not a tragedy in the strict sense. Angst-ridden and petty, Willy hardly fits the mold of Oedipus or Othello. His “low” status raises the question of whether his demise brings about a cartharsis or sentimental pathos. Is his anguish universal or isolated? Miller never meant for Willy to fit the classic archetype. Modernity, he contends, renders the requirement of regality moot: “If rank or nobility of character was indispensable, then it would follow that the problems of those with rank were the particular problems of tragedy. But surely the right of one monarch to capture the domain from another no longer raises our passions, nor are our concepts of justice what they were to the

mind of an Elizabethan king” (Theater Essays 5). In place of cosmic forces, social conditions—in this case, unreasonable expectations encoded in the American dream—create inevitable tragic consequences. Harold Bloom, a prominent American literary critic, adjudicates a compromise. Willy, he contends, sustains the “aesthetic dignity” inherent in all tragic heroes, and although he does not have “the authentic dignity of the protagonist . . . his sincere pathos does have authentic aesthetic dignity, because he does not die the death of a salesman. He dies the death of a father, perhaps not the universal father, but a father central enough to touch anguish of the universal” (7). If universal appeal is the mark of tragedy, then Salesman’s best case may be empirical. In its 1983 Beijing run, Chinese audience members wept openly. Brenda Murphy describes an even more remarkable example of the play’s ability to capture disparate imaginations: “Death of a Salesman has been played before a native audience in a small Arctic village with the same villagers returning night after night to witness the performance in a language they did not understand” (106). Regardless of whether Salesman is a “real” tragedy or not, it continues to inspire audiences, even those who have never experienced the pressures of the American dream.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Develop a list of qualities embodied in the “American dream.” Discuss each character’s reactions to and ideas about this dream. What does it mean to each character? What does it mean to you? Is it an attainable ideal for everyone or a hollow ruse that damages individuals’ psyches, distracting them from more meaningful existences? 2. Although Happy never expresses ill will toward his father for favoring Biff, Biff is clearly the prodigal son. Yet, with his career choices and preference for felicitous deception over uncomfortable truth, Happy bears a sharper resemblance to his father than does Biff. Discuss the effect of Willy’s parenting style on Happy and Biff. Why does Biff rebel against his father’s

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wishes? Why is Happy content to follow in Willy’s footsteps? With your own experiences in mind, discuss the influence parents exert over their children’s futures. How much freedom should parents give their children to choose their own destinies? 3. After reading (or viewing a performance of) Miller’s 1947 play All My Sons, discuss similarities and differences between it and Death of a Salesman. Consider such subcomparisons as the following: (a) Compare Joe Keller with Willy Loman. Do they commit suicide for the same reason(s)? What are the dilemmas each man faces? What overlap between their predicaments do you recognize? Does either character resonate as an “everyman,” or are their stories exclusive to their particular situations? (b) Compare Miller’s use of structure as a developmental tool, keeping in mind Miller’s conviction that every “catastrophe was the story of how the birds came home to roost. . . , that a play without a past is a mere shadow of a play” (Theater Essays 548). How does the past reveal its effect on the present in each play? Which method of structural development is more conducive to making the past-present relationship evident: the linear progression of All My Sons or the collage of overlapping memories, the blending of external action with internal consciousness in Death of a Salesman? (c) Miller attributed his Broadway breakthrough to a “simple shift of relationships. . . , a shift which did not and could not solve the problem of [his earlier plays], but . . . made at least two . . . plays that followed possible, and a great deal else besides” (Theater Essays 126). The two plays are All My Sons and Death of a Salesman; they were “made possible” by Miller’s realization that he was unconsciously preoccupied with “the father-son relationship.” Both plays depict a father whose two sons follow disparate courses. Compare the triangular relationship of father, older son, and younger son

in both plays. How does the father-son relationship contribute to the tragedy of each story? When children become disillusioned with their parental models, is tragedy an inevitable outcome? 4. Why does Death of a Salesman continue to resonate with contemporary audiences? In an interview with Mathew Roudané, Miller hypothesized that the play has “more or less the same effect everywhere there is a dominating technology” (Theater Essays 420). What does Miller mean by a dominating technology? What is the dominating technology in Willy’s time? In our time? 5. Discuss the tragic merits of Death of a Salesman. Does Willy Loman’s story precipitate a catharsis of pity and fear, or does it merely elicit sentimental compassion for a single broken man? In order to answer this question, read Aristotle’s section on tragedy in Poetics and Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man.” Does Death of a Salesman warrant a reconsideration of Aristotle’s defi nition? 6. The opening stage directions of Death of a Salesman are among the most famous in American drama. The published version of the play begins, “A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fi ne, telling of grass and trees and the horizon.” Miller’s lyrical language contrasts with traditional stage directions, which in Shakespeare’s time were typically limited to two or three words. What, if anything, do Miller’s directions contribute to the play? How do they set the mood? Does the music add to or detract from Miller’s tragic intentions?

The Crucible (1953) When The Crucible premiered on January 22, 1953, at New York’s Martin Beck Theatre, Miller was already considered one of the leading playwrights of his generation. All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949) combined for more than a thousand Broadway performances, two Drama Critics Circle Awards, two Donaldson Awards, two Tony

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Awards, and one Pulitzer Prize. Despite opening to mixed reviews, The Crucible cemented Miller’s literary reputation, placing him in the company of Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Yet, while the play secured Miller’s standing alongside the giants of American drama, it drew the ire of political conservatives and thrust Miller into the center of a national controversy. Citing Miller’s “communist sympathies,” the State Department revoked his passport and prevented him from traveling to Belgium for The Crucible’s international premier. Three years later, after his refusal to identify other communist artists, the U.S. House of Representatives held Miller in contempt, a crime for which he received a one-month suspended jail sentence and a $500 fi ne. Since then, the communist threat has dissipated, but The Crucible remains popular. It was made into a fi lm starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder in 1996 and is routinely staged in the United States and abroad. Part morality play, part personal tragedy, part social commentary, The Crucible dramatizes the notorious Salem witch trials of 1692. When the town preacher’s daughter, Betty Parris, descends into a catatonic stupor after participating in a ritualistic campfi re ceremony, rumor of satanic infi ltration spreads throughout Salem, a small Massachusetts enclave of Puritan colonials. Reverend Parris suspects Betty’s cousin, Abigail Williams, of spreading witchcraft among the town’s girls, and, when pressed, Abigail claims to have fallen, along with Betty and a dozen others, under the spell of the Parris family’s slave, Tituba. The accusation sets off a series of forced confessions and accusations. In a matter of days, the Massachusetts government establishes a tribunal to root out witchcraft. Within the atmosphere of suspicion and fear, a few opportunistic individuals exact vengeance on local rivals, accusing them of “trucking with the devil,” hoping to seize vacated land, or, in Abigail’s case, a former lover’s attention. Abigail’s zeal forces John Proctor into a hero’s role. Having had an affair with Abigail sometime prior to the action on stage, Proctor is trying to repair his marriage when Abigail accuses his wife, Elizabeth, of witchcraft. Proctor’s refusal to surrender Elizabeth to the authorities puts him

under suspicion, but unlike the majority of the accused, he refuses to implicate his neighbors. In the fi nal scene, Proctor declines to sign a confession, crying out, “I have given you my soul; leave me my name!” Disappointed, Deputy Governor Danforth sentences Proctor to death. On the most literal level, The Crucible is a work of historical fiction. Before composing a word, Miller sifted through thousands of pages of land deeds, personal correspondence, and trial proceedings. Although he used considerable dramatic license, his characters are based on historical figures. Like his dramatic counterpart, Reverend Parris was a divisive preacher who elicited dread from parishioners and drove away several independentminded churchgoers. His daughter, Betty, and niece, Abigail, generated suspicions of satanic infi ltration when, after experimenting with the occult, they fell ill. Records also verify that Anne Putnam held a grudge against Rebecca Nurse, who, despite a reputation for benevolence, was hanged on July 19, 1692. The real-life John Proctor had an independent streak that angered his fellows; as in the play, he opposed the witch hunt from the outset. His indignation is a matter of public record: “If [the affl icted girls] were let alone, we should all be devils and witches quickly. They should rather be had to the whipping post [where one might] thrash the Devil out of [them]” (quoted in Hansen 53). In all, between June 1692 and May 1693, 20 people were executed; five more died in prison. More than 200 were incarcerated. Because of the mysterious nature of witchcraft, the only “evidence” required for conviction was the testimony of another townsperson. From a contemporary vantage, the Salem witch trials might seem an isolated bout of communal insanity. Such an interpretation, however, neglects the historical record; the episode was not a mere aberration. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, European women were routinely burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft. Almost no one questioned the existence of witches. They were recognized not only in the Bible, but also in legal codes, philosophical treatises, scientific literature, and medical textbooks. Within a century, witchcraft became an obsolete explanation for ill-

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ness, accidents, and other calamities. The Crucible counts on the audience’s inability to identify with late 17th-century worldviews. In doing so, the play underscores the changing nature of cultural belief systems, questions the legitimacy of judging others on the basis of these systems, and casts doubt on ethical, religious, and political “certainties.” Reverend Hale, who, during the play’s course, undergoes the greatest personal growth, voices these sentiments: “The very crowns of holy law I brought, and what I touched with my bright confidence, it died; and where I turned the eye of my great faith, blood flowed up. . . . Life is God’s most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it” (Collected Plays 1945–1961 444). Miller wants audiences and readers to probe their own moral views, bearing in mind that the passing of time will likely render them antiquated and barbaric. He suggests that just as we look upon the Salem hysteria with contempt and amusement, so too will future generations look upon our own times. Seen in this light, the Salem episode demonstrates the need for moral restraint and social acceptance. Miller also wants audiences to recognize parallels between the Salem witch hunts and the red scare that swept the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Few failed to see the connection in 1953, when witch hunt was common parlance for congressional efforts to root out communist infi ltration in the United States. In order to appreciate the play in today’s post–cold war era, it must be placed in historical context. Eight years before The Crucible reached the stage, in the aftermath of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the only viable global leaders. Never comfortable allies during the war, their uneasy partnership quickly devolved into a fierce competition for economic and political allies. In 1947, the United States began offering fi nancial support to overseas anticommunist regimes, no matter how corrupt or abusive. The same year, by executive order, President Harry Truman instituted “loyalty” review boards to bar communist sympathizers from government employment. Meanwhile, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated communist subversion, both

inside and outside the government. Among the committee’s targets, Hollywood screenwriters and directors were the most prominent. Several were accused of disseminating communist propaganda and were cited for contempt when, in their own defense, they invoked the First Amendment. Public fear, already high, peaked in 1949 when the Soviet Union tested its fi rst atomic bomb. On February 9, 1950, Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin’s little-known junior senator, delivered a now-infamous speech in which he claimed to have a list of State Department employees who were “known members of the Communist Party.” The speech was not recorded, and the audience was small. Nevertheless, rumor of the allegation spread quickly. Within weeks, the Senate created an ad hoc panel—the Tydings Committee—to investigate McCarthy’s charges. When pressed, McCarthy whittled his list of communist State Department workers from 205 to nine. All were exonerated. By then, however, McCarthy had captured the public’s imagination. After he was reelected in 1952, McCarthy was appointed chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, which, together with HUAC, forced thousands to explain their political beliefs and profess loyalty to the United States. In the wake of the anticommunist crusade, McCarthy and other politicians ruined thousands of careers. Even when cleared of illegal activity, the accused were often fi red, shunned by friends and coworkers, and shut out of community organizations. In early 1953, when The Crucible opened on Broadway, few had the courage to criticize McCarthy’s tactics. High-visibility anticommunists such as McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover did not tolerate dissent. These men divided Americans into two camps, echoing Danforth’s warning to Francis Nurse in Act 3: “A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between” (416). Using the same polarizing logic, McCarthy bullied witnesses and political opponents, branding anyone who disagreed with his browbeating methods a “traitor.” In one of the great examples of life imitating art, political opponents considered The Crucible as evidence that its creator was an enemy

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of the United States. The play called Miller to the attention of HUAC, which summoned him to testify in 1956. As did Proctor, Miller pleaded guilty—he had dabbled in socialism during his college years—but he refused to incriminate others. Resembling the Salem trials, the McCarthy and HUAC hearings promised absolution to defendants willing to “name names.” The year before The Crucible premiered, Miller felt personally betrayed when one of his closest friends, the stage and fi lm director Elia Kazan, exposed a handful of Miller’s colleagues during a HUAC deposition. Just as it had during the Salem witch hunts, politics turned friends into foes, rivals into enemies. Leaders in both eras used public anxiety to turn neighbors against one another. Accusing a rival of communist sympathies—so-called redbaiting—became an effective measure for seizing power in both political and business arenas, just as accusing George Jacob of witchcraft enables Thomas Putnam to seize the imprisoned man’s land. In 1989, 36 years after he wrote The Crucible, Miller commented, “I could not imagine spending so much time [writing] what seemed to me so obvious a tale. But as the anti-Communist crusade settled in, and showed signs of becoming the permanent derangement of the American psyche, a kind of mystery began to emerge from its melodramas and comedies. We were all behaving differently than we used to; we had drunk from the cup of suspicion of one another. . . . We had entered a mysterious pall from which there seemed no exit” (Theater Essays 461). Two of the most bizarre and appalling episodes in American history—the Salem trials and the communist witch hunts—ended when exhaustion and moral outrage overwhelmed anxiety and fear. The Crucible does not dramatize the aftermath of the Salem episode, primarily because its contemporary analog, the red scare, was still in full swing when it reached the stage. A year after the play opened on Broadway, James Welch, special counsel for the army, humiliated McCarthy on national television, asking him, “Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left

no sense of decency?” Within months, the Senate formally censured McCarthy for abusing his power. By the time Miller published his Collected Plays in 1957, he considered it safe to discuss The Crucible’s allegory. The republished text of the play includes supplemental commentary linking the characters and stories to the communist witch hunts. Half a century later, with McCarthy in his grave, HUAC decommissioned, and communism no longer a threat, the red scare has joined the Salem witch trials in the history books. In the intervening years, public sentiment vindicates Miller’s interpretation of both events—that they are, above all, shameful. With cold war hysteria a distant memory, The Crucible’s continued popularity defi ed many mid20th-century critical expectations. There are several explanations for the play’s endurance. In terms of pure entertainment value, few 20th-century American plays can match The Crucible. Beyond this, the play still resonates with readers and audiences, who recognize an irrational “us and them” attitude in 21st-century American culture. Bloom suggests that the play lacks the aesthetic range of a genuine tragedy, but the “social benignity is . . . beyond questioning. . . . We would have to mature beyond our national tendency to moral and religious self-righteousness for The Crucible to dwindle into another period-piece, and that maturation is nowhere in sight” (Modern Critical Interpretations: The Crucible 2). Miller thinks it taps into something even more basic, “something very fundamental in the human animal: the fear of the unknown, and particularly the dread of social isolation” (Theater Essays 463). If he is right, The Crucible will fascinate for decades to come.

For Discussion or Writing 1. After watching the 2005 fi lm Good Night and Good Luck, compare the Salem and communist witch hunts. Discuss the similarities and differences between (a) John Proctor and the American journalist Edward R. Murrow or (b) Deputy Governor Danforth and Joseph McCarthy.

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2. Keeping The Crucible in mind, discuss the confl ict between security and liberty. Why are these two values so often at odds with each other? How might the confl ict be resolved? Consider researching a historical period in which these questions were the topic of national or international debate and compare the conditions to those depicted in The Crucible. Potential areas of inquiry include domestic spying and indefi nite detention of “enemy combatants” in post-9/11 America, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the suppression of “heresy” during the Spanish Inquisition, and the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. 3. Although Miller based The Crucible on real events and people, he alters key facts to heighten the play’s dramatic effect. For example, Miller fabricated the affair between John Proctor and Abigail Williams; in reality, Proctor was 60 years old when he was tried and executed, while Williams was only 11. With this in mind, discuss the pros and cons of “dramatic license.” Should authors be limited in their straying from documented fact when they build a work on a historical foundation? Is there a sharp distinction between “history” and “fiction”? What does “Based on a True Story” mean? 4. Discuss the portrayal of gender in The Crucible. Given that most of the Salem witch hunt victims were female, is it significant that the play’s hero is male? Why or why not? 5. Critics generally agree that The Crucible succeeds as a social critique of mid-20th-century American politics. However, both shortly after the play’s premiere and decades later, critics have disagreed on the play’s merits as a tragedy. In Poetics, Aristotle defi nes tragedy as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its katharsis of such emotions. . . . Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts

determine its quality—namely, Plot, Characters, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Melody.” Does The Crucible meet these criteria? Does the play depict lasting, universal qualities of human existence, or is it a period piece destined to fade as its political relevance diminishes?

A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956) Miller originally conceived A View from the Bridge as a one-act “curtain raiser” for A Memory of Two Mondays (1955). Upon completing the fi rst draft, he decided Bridge should headline the bill. After trial runs in New Haven and Boston, both plays premiered on September 29, 1955, at New York’s Coronet Theatre. Reviews were largely negative; the play ran for only 149 performances. Critics complained that Bridge’s structure, language, and characterization failed to engage audiences. Miller rewrote the play the following year, dividing it into two acts, transcribing the chorus’s verse lines into prose, prescribing a more realistic set design, and enlarging the central characters’ emotional range. Unwilling to allow the New York critical community to run it “through the mill again,” Miller chose London for the expanded version’s October 1956 premiere. The changes to the script, not to mention the locale, paid off. Warm reviews from the London press and a successful run in Paris the following year led Miller to publish the second version, which has since become the standard edition. A View from the Bridge dramatizes the last few weeks in the life of Eddie Carbone, an Italian longshoreman in the impoverished bayside Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. The action begins when Eddie’s wife, Beatrice, opens their home to two Sicilian relatives, Marco and Rodolfo. Though he is initially happy to help Beatrice’s family, Eddie’s support withers when Rodolfo courts his live-in niece, Catherine, whom Eddie has raised as his own child. At fi rst, his objections seem to be normal fatherly behavior, but as the play progresses, Eddie reveals a

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long-suppressed sexual passion for Catherine, a passion that drives Eddie to break Red Hook’s strict loyalty code. When Eddie reports Rodolfo and Marco to the Immigration Bureau, the community ostracizes him and Marco vows revenge. While awaiting deportment, Marco confronts Eddie about the betrayal. Hoping to earn back the community’s respect, Eddie lodges counteraccusations and a fight ensues, which ends when Marco turns Eddie’s knife on him. The fi nal curtain drops as Eddie dies in Beatrice’s arms. A View from the Bridge grew out of an anecdote Miller heard while researching corruption and Mafia influence in Brooklyn’s waterfront labor unions. In 1947, seeking a project to follow All My Sons, Miller became fascinated with Red Hook, which despite its proximity—Miller lived only blocks away—was foreign and enigmatic. A lifelong New Yorker, Miller nonetheless felt disconnected from the disparate cultures that made New York the world’s most cosmopolitan city. The play’s title captures the feeling of detachment: As did Miller, most of the city’s residents only glimpsed Red Hook from the Brooklyn Bridge. Hoping to forge a deeper connection, Miller spent a year hobnobbing in Red Hook bars and attending morning dockside roll calls when longshoremen jockeyed for a day’s work. He also traveled to Sicily, witnessing the crippling poverty that drove thousands of local residents, seeking work and a better life, to the United States. On the basis of these experiences, he collaborated with the prospective director, Elia Kazan, on a screenplay, The Hook. Studio executives quashed the fi lm, refusing to provide fi nancial backing for a movie with an “unAmerican” attitude. Miller declined to revise the screenplay, and The Hook eventually morphed into two separate projects. Kazan commissioned Bud Schulberg to write On the Waterfront (1954), a critically acclaimed fi lm starring Marlon Brando in an Oscar-winning performance as the longshoreman Terry Malloy. The following year A View from the Bridge appeared on Broadway. Although they both portray life in Red Hook, Waterfront and Bridge draw differing conclusions about the virtue of loyalty. In Kazan’s fi lm, Malloy heroically defies Red

Hook’s code of silence to bring down a tyrannical Mafia union leader. In contrast, Eddie Carbone dies a traitor after selling out his wife’s cousins. Both stories allegorize the U.S. government’s crusade against communist infi ltration. In 1952, while testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Kazan disclosed the names of several American communist supporters. On the Waterfront was Kazan’s answer to Miller and other critics who considered Kazan’s testimony an unforgivable betrayal. Two years later, Miller received a contempt citation for refusing to “name names” during his own HUAC deposition. Miller intended Bridge to capture the tragedy of contravening social taboos. A View from the Bridge is more than a sociopolitical statement. It is also an attempt at contemporary Greek tragedy. In a 1983 interview, Miller told Mathew Roudané: When I heard this story the fi rst time . . . it struck me even then how Greek it was. You knew from the fi rst minute that it would be a disaster. Everybody around him with any intelligence would have told Eddie that it would be a disaster if he didn’t give up his obsession. But it’s the nature of the obsession that it can’t be given up. The obsession becomes more powerful than the individual it inhabits, like a force from another world. (Theater Essays 426)

With Bridge, Miller replicates several features of Greek tragedy. Although antiquity’s tragic heroes are never of common stock, they share Eddie’s inability to control external forces. Eddie’s unacceptable desire brings him down, just as fate destroys Oedipus and hubris ruins Agamemnon. The lawyer Alfieri functions as a Greek chorus, an intermediary between the audience and the characters. His communal role as an attorney mirrors this in-between space. As an Italian, he operates within the Red Hook community, but unlike the longshoremen, he is educated and relatively wealthy. His status as both/neither insider and/ nor outsider allows him not only to counsel Eddie against betraying Marco and Rodolfo and to

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resist his desire for Catherine but also to narrate, explain, and judge Eddie’s behavior. The original one-act structure reproduces the steady crescendo common in Greek drama. It also captures Miller’s intent to subsume characterization and social commentary under the umbrella of thematic content and narrative development. Miller explains: Everything that is said in the Greek classic play is going to advance the order, the theme, in manifest ways. There is no time for the character to reveal himself apart from the thematic concerns. . . . [The Greeks] thought art is form; a conscious but at the same time an inspired act. . . . I began A View from the Bridge in its first version with the feeling that I would make one single constantly rising trajectory, until its fall, rather like an arrow shot from a bow; and this form would declare rather than conceal itself. (Theater Essays 426)

2.

3.

4. The fi rst version, a “hard, telegraphic, unadorned drama,” was designed to “advance the progress of Eddie’s catastrophe in a most direct way” (Theater Essays 219). Unfortunately for Miller, critics assailed this lack of “adornment,” calling the play an “unaesthetic” concoction, lambasting the lack of psychological development that made Death of a Salesman an instant classic. After the London premier, Miller admitted that the revisions improved the play, a concession he later repeated in several interviews and essays. Whenever he spoke or wrote about Bridge, however, his tone betrayed a subtle resentment, as if he wished audiences and critics had appreciated his homage to Greek tragedy. Despite the compromises—or perhaps because of them—the play has remained in the American repertoire for five decades.

5.

6.

is more appropriate to the story and/or truer to Eddie’s character? Read both published versions of A View from the Bridge. Is the two-act revision an improvement on the one-act original? When answering this question, discuss the difference in language. Why would Miller choose to tell this story in verse? Was rewriting the play in prose a good idea? It was not until the 20th century that “serious” playwrights abandoned verse. Discuss the expressive limitations of both verse and prose. Does one style better capture contemporary life? After reading Miller’s The Crucible—or alternatively watching the 1996 film version—compare Eddie Carbone with John Proctor. Discuss each man’s desire to preserve his “name.” Does one succeed more than the other? Is either right to sacrifice everything to maintain and/or regain respect? Do you agree with Alfieri’s judgment that Eddie’s actions, though perverse, are “pure,” that Eddie “allowed himself to be wholly known”? Does Alfieri’s assessment add to or detract from the play—that is, does it interfere with or enhance the audience’s ability to assess Eddie’s character and behavior? For centuries, incest has fascinated playwrights and their audiences; for instance, Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle and Shakespeare’s Hamlet contain incestuous undercurrents. Does incest make for good theater? If so, why? Miller wanted audiences to react to A View from the Bridge in the same way Greek audiences reacted to the great Athenian tragedies. Compare Miller’s play with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and The Eumenides, and Euripides’ Medea.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In an unpublished third version of A View from the Bridge, Eddie Carbone commits suicide. This ending was staged in Paris just after the play’s successful 1956 London run. How, if at all, does the play change if Eddie dies by his own hand rather than Marco’s? Which ending

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MILLER AND HIS WORK 1. The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen heavily influenced Miller’s early efforts. After Miller completed the Ibsenesque All My Sons,

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his fi rst Broadway success, he sought to escape Ibsen’s shadow. Read—or, if you can, watch a production of—Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and/ or An Enemy of the People. Compare Ibsen’s plays with one or more of Miller’s. How do Ibsen and Miller use drama as social commentary? What commonalities in structure, style, and tone do you recognize? Where do Miller and Ibsen diverge? If you are familiar with All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, discuss the reduction in Ibsen’s influence in the latter play. For more in-depth study, compare Miller’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People with the original. 2. Born only four years apart, two of America’s greatest playwrights, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, gained prominence at the same time—The Glass Menagerie, Williams’s fi rst Broadway hit, debuted three years before All My Sons. Like Miller, Williams is primarily remembered for a handful of early plays. After reading or viewing The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, compare and contrast Miller’s work with Williams’s. How does each author use drama to comment on social problems? Which writer is more concerned with the individual’s psyche? With political issues? 3. All My Sons portrays a middle-aged man leading a comfortable upper-middle-class lifestyle in post–World War II America. As the play progresses, the audience learns that he made his fortune during the war manufacturing weapons, some of which failed, killing American soldiers. In the wake of the U.S.-led Iraq war and the subsequent allegations of war profiteering by companies like Bechtel and Halliburton, All My Sons has had a resurgence of popularity. How relevant is the play to contemporary wartime politics? 4. In his introduction to the revised version of A View from the Bridge, Miller laments what he saw, at that time, as a “retreat into psycho-sexual romanticism” in American theater. Because he is known primarily for his political and social

commentary, Miller’s treatment of sexuality is often overlooked. Yet in three of his most famous works—Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge—a suppressed sexual relationship lies at the center of confl ict. Discuss Miller’s treatment of sexuality, perhaps by comparing it to the more overt—and famous— treatment Tennessee Williams gives it. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Abbotson, Susan C. W. Student Companion to Arthur Miller. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Arthur Miller Society Official Web site. Available online. URL: http://www.ibiblio.org/miller/. Accessed May 16, 2007. Bigsby, Christopher. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. A Critical Introduction to TwentiethCentury American Drama. Vol. 2: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Bigsby, Christopher, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bloom, Harold. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1996. ———. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1996. Brater, Enoch. Arthur Miller: A Playwright’s Life and Works. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005. ———. Arthur Miller’s America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Centola, Steven R. “All My Sons.” In The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, edited by C. W. E. Bigshy, 48–59. New York: Cambridge University Press. Corrigan, Robert W., ed. Arthur Miller: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969. Ferres, John H., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Crucible. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972. Fried, Albert. McCarthyism: The Great American Red Scare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Galvin, Rachel. “Arthur Miller Biography.” National Endowment for the Humanities. Available online. URL: http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/miller/ biography.html. Accessed May 16, 2007. Gottfried, Martin. Arthur Miller: His Life and Work. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003. Gould, Jean. Modern American Playwrights. New York: Dodd, 1966. Griffin, Alice. Understanding Arthur Miller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: George Braziller, 1969. Harmon, William, C. Hugh Holman, William Flint Thrall, eds. A Handbook to Literature. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000. Hayman, Robert. Arthur Miller. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. Hill, Frances. The Salem Witch Trials Reader. New York: Da Capo Press, 2000. Koon, Helene Wickham, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1983. Koorey, Stefani. Arthur Miller’s Life and Literature: An Annotated and Comprehensive Guide. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000 Martine, James J., ed. Critical Essays on Arthur Miller. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979.

Miller, Arthur. Collected Plays 1944–1961. New York: Library of America, 2006. ———. Collected Plays, Volume I. New York: Viking, 1957. ———. Collected Plays, Volume II. New York: Viking, 1981. ———. Echoes down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944–2000. Edited by Steven R. Centola. New York: Viking, 2000. ———. I Don’t Need You Anymore: Stories by Arthur Miller. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. Resurrection Blues. New York: Penguin, 2006. ———. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Edited by Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. ———. Timebends: A Life. New York: Penguin, 1987. Moss, Leonard. Arthur Miller. New Haven, Conn.: College & University Press, 1967. Murphy, Brenda. Miller: Death of a Salesman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Roach, Marilynne K. The Salem Witch Trials: A Dayby-Day Chronicle of a Community under Siege. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. Roudané, Mathew, ed. Approaches to Teaching Miller’s Death of a Salesman. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995. Welland, Dennis. Miller: The Playwright. London: Methuen, 1979.

J. Earen Rast

N. Scott Momaday (1934–

)

Oral tradition is the other side of the miracle of language. That tradition is especially and above all the seat of the imagination, and the imagination is a kind of divine blindness in which we see not with our eyes, but with our minds and souls, in which we dream the world and our being in it. (The Man Made of Words)

N

avarre Scott Momaday, the only child of Alfred (Al) Morris and Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday, was born on February 27, 1934, at the Kiowa and Comanche Indian Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma. Momaday’s family history spans several cultures and ethnicities. Growing up on reservations and in pueblos in the Southwest, Momaday lived among Navajo, Apache, Hispanic, and Anglo families. These experiences, along with his father’s Kiowa and to some extent his mother’s French, Scottish, and Cherokee heritage, have had a great impact on Momaday’s works, which often fuse diverse cultural beliefs. When he was six months old, Momaday traveled with his parents to the Black Hills, a solitary mountain range straddling the South Dakota–Wyoming border. In the shadow of Devil’s Tower, the fi rst U.S. national monument, they met Pohd-lohk, a Kiowa elder, who gave Momaday his Indian name, Tsoai-talee. The name links Momaday to a Kiowa myth in which a young boy transforms into a bear and hunts his seven sisters. In order to escape their bear-brother, the sisters scramble up a magic tree stump, which grows as they climb. Frustrated, the bear rends the bark from the tree, which becomes Tsoai, or “rock-tree,” the Kiowa name for Devil’s Tower, a large rock formation in Wyoming (for pictures of the Devil’s Tower monument visit the National Park Service’s Web site: http://www.nps. gov/deto/). Fascinated with the mythic origins of

his Kiowa name, translated as “Rock-tree Boy,” Momaday incorporates the myth in all four of his longer works: House Made of Dawn (1968), The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), The Names! Memoir (1976), and The Ancient Child (1989). The bear myth connects him with Kiowa oral tradition and culture, and the bear-boy’s metamorphosis mirrors Momaday’s struggle to negotiate oft-confl icting cultures. When he was two, Momaday’s parents left the Kiowa people for the Southwest, where they found work as teachers. For the next 10 years, the Momadays found jobs near the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1946, they settled in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, where Al and Natachee ran a two-teacher day school. Momaday traveled to Bernalillo and Albuquerque, 30 and 60 miles from their remote home, to attend high school. With encouragement from his parents, who wanted him to experience fi nancial and artistic success outside the reservation, Momaday spent his senior year at the Augustus Military Academy, an elite, predominately white private school in Fort Defiance, Virginia. After fi rst attending the University of New Mexico (UNM), Momaday transferred in 1956 to the University of Virginia, where he intended to study law. He abandoned this plan a year later, returning to UNM, where he graduated in 1958 with a degree in political science and minors in

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English and speech. Recruited by the State Department of Education, Momaday taught English to Apache students at a K–12 school in Dulce, New Mexico, a small town on the Jicarilla Reservation. On the advice of a friend, Momaday applied for and received the Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University during his fi rst year of teaching. There, he studied under Yvor Winters, a leading mid-20th-century poet and literary critic. Winters immediately noted Momaday’s talent, predicting he would be “a famous man . . . perhaps even a great one.” While under Winters’s tutelage at Stanford, Momaday wrote several poems later collected in Angle of Geese (1974) and The Gourd Dancer (1976). Although Momaday planned to stay in California for only one year, the close relationship he developed with Winters led him to pursue an advanced degree. Having written his dissertation on the little-known 19th-century American poet Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Momaday received a doctorate in English literature four years after arriving at Stanford. Momaday took his fi rst university teaching position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he created a course on the American Indian oral tradition and researched Kiowa history and myth. During this period, Momaday’s grandmother informed him that the Tai-me bundle, a sacred Kiowa relic, existed. According to Kiowa tradition, a keeper or priest is charged with guarding Tai-me. Until 1887, the keeper performed an essential role in the Sun Dance, an ancient ceremony vital to the tribe’s cultural identity. In the late 19th century, facing the U.S. Cavalry and increasing pressure to assimilate with white culture, the Kiowa abandoned the Sun Dance ritual. By the time Momaday grew interested in it, Tai-me was virtually forgotten. Learning of its location, Momaday traveled to Oklahoma, visited the home of the keeper, and, using customary, ritualistic gestures, viewed the medicine bundle. The experience had a profound effect on him. His attempts to uncover the history and importance of Tai-me led to his fi rst major work, The Journey of Tai-me (1967), a collection of Kiowa myths and legends privately printed.

In 1966, while composing The Journey of Tai-me, he traveled to Amherst, Massachusetts, on a Guggenheim scholarship. There he prepared a critical study on Emily Dickinson. He also worked on a third project, one he completed in 1968. That year Harper & Row invited Momaday to submit a collection of poetry. Instead, he submitted a novel entitled House Made of Dawn. Set in two locations—on the Jemez Reservation and in Los Angeles—House Made of Dawn explores the alienation contemporary Native Americans often experience when trying to assimilate into white society and also when following traditional ways far removed from modern life. The book earned critical acclaim and received the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. House Made of Dawn marked a major breakthrough not only for Momaday but also for Native American authors, who drew inspiration from Momaday’s text. In fact, critics often refer to the outpouring of Native American texts since House Made of Dawn’s 1969 publication as the “Native American renaissance,” an expression coined by Kenneth Lincoln. In 1969 Momaday left Santa Barbara for the University of California, Berkeley. There he completed and published his next major work, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), which combined personal memoir, Kiowa myth, and tribal history with pictographic illustrations drawn by his father, Al. Though 20 years elapsed before Momaday published another novel, his career flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In 1970, he wrote “An American Land Ethic,” the fi rst of several essays supporting the conservation movement. After three years at Berkeley, Momaday accepted a job offer from Stanford, where he taught for nine years. In 1973, he teamed with the photographer David Muench to produce the nonfiction work Colorado, a poetical sketchbook celebrating the Rocky Mountains. The following year, having received temporary leave from Stanford, Momaday accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Moscow, where he taught the school’s fi rst course in American literature. In Russia, he experienced a burst of creative energy; as his father, a successful painter, Momaday began to draw and paint. Since

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then he has exhibited his work, won awards, and adorned his major written works with sketches and paintings. At the same time he discovered his talent for visual art, Momaday returned to poetry. While in Moscow, he wrote the poems assembled in part 3 of The Gourd Dancer (1976), the fi rst collection of Momaday’s poetry available to a wide audience. The Gourd Dancer reprinted all the poems published in the chapbook Angle of Geese and Other Poems (1974), many of which, including “The Bear,” “Buteo Regalis,” and “Angle of Geese,” Momaday wrote as a graduate student, using the rigid syllabic guidelines Winters had taught him. When he returned to writing poetry several years later, his lyrical voice changed. The poems collected in part 2 of The Gourd Dancer document this shift. Although Momaday uses syllabic verse in “The Omen” and “The EagleFeather Fan,” most of the pieces are prose poems, a form suitable to the rhythms of Indian storytelling and ceremony. Meanwhile, Momaday continued to write prose. The same year The Gourd Dancer appeared in bookstores, he published The Names: A Memoir (1976). While The Way to Rainy Mountain blends autobiographical elements with Kiowa myth and history, The Names chronicles Momaday’s youth and adolescence. In this work, Momaday focuses on the power of the imagination, which he considers vital to creating an identity. Growing up among Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache Indians, Momaday had to rely on his imagination to connect with his ancestors’ Plains culture. Although Momaday has written less since the late 1970s, his reputation continues to grow; his works continue to be taught and read. In 1981 he took a teaching position at the University of Arizona, where he has remained for a quarter-century. He currently occupies the Regents Professorship in the Humanities. In the early 1980s, with the Native American renaissance in full bloom, his works received a great deal of critical attention. By the time Momaday completed his second novel, The Ancient Child (1989), several major studies of his earlier works had been published. The Ancient Child solidified his literary reputation, particularly with university scholars, who

often value complex texts. With its many literary, philosophical, and mythological allusions, The Ancient Child is a demanding novel. The story centers on Set, a Kiowa painter who, as does Abel in House Made of Dawn, has a spiritual awakening when he immerses himself in native cultural traditions. After arriving in Oklahoma for his grandmother’s funeral, Set meets Grey, a young medicine woman, who helps him confront a mysterious “ancient child,” the same mythological boy-turnedbear with whom Momaday himself identifies. As Momaday does, Set discovers an inner spiritual connection not only with the legendary bear-boy but with myth in general. Throughout the 1990s, Momaday continued to broaden his artistic scope. In 1992, he published In the Presence of the Sun, a collection of poetry, prose, drawings, and paintings. Two years later, he produced a children’s book, Circle of Wonder: A Native American Christmas Story. His 1997 essay collection The Man Made of Words offers a comprehensive view of Momaday’s evolving thought on subjects ranging from environmental conservation to racism. With his latest offering, In the Bear’s House (1999), he explores his lifelong fascination with bears, using theaterlike dialogue, formal and informal poetry, short stories, and paintings to express his thoughts. In this work, his many talents are obvious: his command of language, his skill with a paintbrush, his ability to synthesize European and Native American tradition and literary forms, and his ability to transcend conventional literary genres. In 2005, the University of Oklahoma awarded him an honorary doctorate of humane letters, his 13th honorary degree. The same year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) rewarded Momaday for his work in teaching others about Native American history and traditions, recognizing him as a UNESCO Artist for Peace. Often called the “dean” of Native American writers, Momaday has earned a distinguished place in the American literary canon. With his use of myth and traditions from many cultures and his respect for the natural world, Momaday speaks to a contemporary world

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still coming to terms with varying ethnic traditions and cultural differences, a world focused on preserving what exists, recovering what has been lost, and venerating the earth, which, for Momaday, is not only the source of life but also our connection with ourselves and with others: the ground upon which the past has been founded and upon which the future will be made.

House Made of Dawn (1968) When House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the jury announced the arrival of a new literary voice in the United States, calling Momaday “a matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americas.” Widely cited as the work that launched the “Native American renaissance,” Momaday’s fi rst novel fuses Euro-American novel form with traditional Kiowa, Pueblo, and Navajo storytelling. Divided into four chapters and a prologue, House Made of Dawn tells the story of Abel, who struggles to fi nd inner peace and a coherent identity. As with Homer’s Odyssey and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, House Made of Dawn tells the story of a homecoming, Abel’s return to Walatowa, New Mexico, after serving in World War II. Since his horrific experience fighting in the war, Abel fi nds it difficult to be a part of Pueblo life. Lost, seemingly affected with something like posttraumatic stress disorder, Abel cannot connect to others or the culture to which he belongs. House Made of Dawn tells of Abel’s journey toward wholeness and his battle to fi nd a place in the world. Spanning a two-week period in 1945, part 1, “The Longhair,” recounts Abel’s sexual affair with a white woman and his murder of an albino Indian. The remainder of the novel details a fourweek period after Abel is released from prison in 1952. Set in Los Angeles, parts 2 and 3—“The Priest of the Sun” and “The Night Chanter”— recount Abel’s failed attempts to assimilate into white society, his struggle with alcoholism, and his attraction to violence. In part 4, “The Dawn Runner,” Abel returns to Walatowa, where he attends to his grandfather, presiding over his deathbed and

arranging his funeral. Part 4 ends as Abel enters a sacred native race. With dawn breaking across the horizon, he covers himself in soot and begins to run. As the novel closes, he fi nds peace by setting his pace to the rhythmic chant of the Navajo Night Chant. After the lyrical prologue, which establishes the novel’s relationship to Pueblo and Navajo oral customs, the action begins in part 1, “The Longhair,” when Abel arrives in his small Pueblo village home in northwestern New Mexico. Abel steps off the bus drunk and barely recognizes his grandfather. This scene is significant; it establishes Abel’s fallen state and serves as a commentary on alcoholism among Native Americans, which became a severe problem for veterans. Upon returning to the United States, many Native American war veterans found themselves alienated from the U.S. government and white society, which continued to view them as second-class citizens despite their contribution to the war effort, as well as alienated from their own people, who could not imagine the horrors they had experienced. When we fi rst encounter Abel, he is both physically and psychologically sick. The question driving House Made of Dawn is, How can Abel and those similarly alienated heal? Answering this question requires understanding the illness. In “The Longhair,” Momaday explores the causes of Abel’s alienation. When Abel arrives in Walatowa, he “does not know” or greet Francisco, who nurtured the young Abel by introducing him to traditional Pueblo customs. Abel’s inability to recognize his grandfather, his closest living relative, indicates the depth of his estrangement. It also highlights Abel’s most striking characteristic: silence. He is the novel’s protagonist, and yet other voices—whether Tosamah’s, Benally’s, or even Francisco’s—drown out Abel’s voice. His silence is not “the older and better part of custom,” or the sign of wisdom; rather, Abel is inarticulate, unable to use language to relate to anything or anyone. Abel’s silence mirrors his inability to connect to the world, preventing him from creating an authentic identity, a sense of self. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a psychological illness combat veterans often experience, accounts for only part of

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Abel’s psychological isolation; a sense of rootlessness is conveyed in the novel’s flashbacks and narrative breaks. Several events and factors contribute to Abel’s alienation prior to the war. He never knew his father, who was “a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and [his brother] Vidal somehow foreign and strange.” His mother and brother died while Abel was young, further disaffecting him from traditional familial structures. Abel’s care fell to his grandfather, Francisco, who may have been fathered by the corrupt priest Nicolas. Of the many memories the narrator explores in “The Longhair,” Abel’s recollection of his hunt with the Eagle Watchers Society is particularly telling. A lifelong member, Francisco introduces Abel to the organization of medicine men and soothsayers. Descendants of the Bahkyush, an ancient Indian tribe reduced to near-extinction in the 19th century, the Eagle Watchers Society is a band of outsiders who never fully assimilated into the Pueblo society. On their yearly hunt, Abel captures and binds a giant female eagle, earning the respect of the group’s members. Yet, he quickly forsakes his newfound identity with the group. Ashamed of holding the eagle captive, he kills it rather than see it imprisoned. After recounting this memory, the narrative flashes forward to Abel’s departure from Walatowa to join the military. Waiting for a cab to arrive, Abel has “no one to wish him well or tell him how it would be.” As Abel rides away, he ignores the passing landscape, focusing instead on the noise and speed of the car. The departure scene iterates a motif that recurs throughout Momaday’s work: the modern struggle between technology and nature. For Momaday, our obsession with technology distances us from nature, a presence in our lives that promises to provide personal and communal wholeness. The narrator notes that Abel could remember “everything in advance of his going . . . [in] whole and in detail. It was the recent past, the intervention of days and years without meaning, of . . . time always immediate and confused, that he could not put together in his mind.” Without a sense of place to ground his experiences, Abel’s memory becomes fragmented.

As an act of imagination, memory is, for Momaday, necessary to our survival, to the creation of a sense of self. In the fi rst and fourth parts of House Made of Dawn, Momaday fuses memory and place by supplementing Abel and Francisco’s recollections with long, poetic descriptions of the landscape. In order for Abel to heal, he must revive his connection to his homeland. In addition to the chapter’s memory sequences, two events in the immediate action illustrate Abel’s alienation. The fi rst focuses on Abel’s relationship with Angela St. John, a married white woman seeking the recuperative qualities of New Mexico’s clean air. Soon after returning to Walatowa, Abel takes a job chopping fi rewood for her and ultimately has a sexual affair with the already-pregnant Angela. Although she fancies herself tolerant and open-minded, Angela stereotypes Abel and the other Native Americans living in the pueblo, making it difficult to gauge her relationship to Abel. By having sex with Angela, Abel further alienates himself from traditional Pueblo society, which, as the narrator notes, has never approved of fornication with outsiders. Neither does the affair allow Abel to connect with Euro-American culture. If anything, it deepens the rift he feels. The second event is more difficult to interpret. Although it is loaded with symbolic meaning, the narrator does not provide Abel’s motivation for murdering the albino. Though Abel never admits it, he appears to be offended when the albino flails him with a rooster during the feast of Santiago. Abel’s embarrassment signals his feelings of inadequacy, for, unlike the albino, Abel fails to pluck the rooster from the ground. Abel’s reaction also indicates the depth of his detachment from his native culture. The albino’s hostile gesture is appropriate to the ceremonial occasion; Abel’s vengeance is not. Yet, the albino is not a hapless victim. He commands an ominous and “unnatural” presence. His eyes are “dead and raw,” his mouth “evil,” his laugh painful, a “strange, inhuman cry.” Associating the albino with a devil-like serpent, Momaday draws freely on biblical imagery in the last scene of “The Longhair,” imagery that resonates with Abel’s biblical namesake. Briefly, we are

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led to believe Abel reverses the curse of his Genesis predecessor; however, rather than freeing him, Abel’s revenge only leads to his own condemnation. While the biblical language of the murder scene may not be obvious, the significance of the albino’s skin color is. In the fi nal two paragraphs alone, the narrator uses the word white more than 20 times, aligning the albino’s wickedness with the white-skinned Europeans, who, using warfare and forced assimilation policies, annihilated Native American ways of life. Just as killing the albino fails to heal Abel’s fractured psyche, so also would taking revenge against white society be futile. Yet, the albino does not merely stand for a dominating culture. Rather, he represents Abel’s inner demons, especially his inability to solve problems peacefully. When the albino upstages Abel in the rooster ceremony, Abel recognizes the extent of his isolation and strikes out, responding as though he is still fighting in Europe. We learn of Abel’s failure midway through the next chapter, when we encounter him badly beaten on a beach outside Los Angeles seven years later. Like the small silver fish the narrator describes in the opening paragraph, Abel is trapped in a cycle of self-sabotage that allows others to take advantage of him. “The Priest of the Sun” continues the novel’s memory-driven narrative, fi lling in Abel’s past, including his murder trial, his wartime experiences, and his romantic relationship with Milly, a social worker overseeing Abel’s postimprisonment reintegration. Momaday bookends these memories with two sermons by John Big Bluff Tosamah, also known as the Priest of the Sun. First appearing halfway through House Made of Dawn, Tosamah articulates some common Momaday themes. In his fi rst sermon, “The Gospel According to John,” Tosamah probes the use and abuse of language. Though his homily contains a good dose of irony— the lengthy monologue excoriates those who talk too much—Tosamah echoes Momaday’s “The Man Made of Words.” Despite differing in tone, both Tosamah’s speech and Momaday’s essay emphasize the importance of language in identity formation. The sermon also exposes how speakers and writers manipulate language to increase their own or their

culture’s power. In the second sermon, “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” the distinction between Tosamah and Momaday vanishes. In what later becomes the introduction to a full-length work of the same name, Momaday projects his family biography into the voice of Tosamah, who, as Momaday was, was removed in early childhood from the seat of Kiowa culture. Recalling his grandmother’s reverence for the Sun and the Plains, Tosamah/Momaday ponders the links among place, identity, oral tradition, and imagination. Yet Tosamah’s ironic persona undercuts his sincerity, forcing other characters— Abel and Benally, for example—to sort through rather than merely accept what he says. “Always showing off and making fun of things,” Tosamah is a trickster, an archetypal character common in Native American mythology. The trickster persona varies—some are playful, others sinister. Whatever form the trickster takes, he or she typically uses wit and mischief to teach a lesson. Tosamah performs this function with Abel, willfully antagonizing him for his “long-hair” ways and inability to assimilate. Tosamah triggers a psychotic rage in Abel, who trips over his own feet while lunging at the grinning Priest of the Sun. Tosamah’s chiding initiates Abel’s fi nal descent and recovery. Never returning to work, he drinks heavily and fi nally awakens bruised and battered on the beach. “The Night Chanter” continues the novel’s experimentation with shifting perspectives and style, replacing the poetic voice of both the thirdperson narration and Tosamah’s sermons with a down-to-earth fi rst-person account. The Night Chanter is Ben Benally, an assimilated Navajo. A potential model for Abel, Benally represents the person Abel might become were he to renounce his Pueblo heritage and embrace the American dream. Ultimately, Benally’s superficial relationship with his native culture proves an unacceptable consequence for Abel. Benally engages in his native customs as if they are mere relics. He sings the Night Chant for amusement while getting drunk. Like the reservation lands he calls “empty and dead,” the Night Chant has lost its vitality and cultural significance. Benally’s plan to meet Abel for one last Night Chant recital signals his desire to make a

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clean break from the past, from his homeland, and from Navajo culture. Fittingly, the trickster figure intervenes: Tosamah calls this dream of becoming a part of American culture a “Jesus scheme” bent on shackling nonconformists. Benally discounts the tirade as an attempt to “show off.” Despite his silence and his quarrel with Tosamah, Abel understands the older man’s point: Forced assimilation and imprisonment are essentially the same. Assimilation is, in fact, the most severe kind of incarceration. Without a cultural center, Abel also lacks his own identity. “The Dawn Runner” presents an alternative to Benally’s model. Abel returns to Walatowa, dresses his grandfather according to tribal custom, and departs for the fields outside town, where he joins the ceremonial runners in the annual dawn race. In the last section, by far the shortest of the four, Momaday returns to the style he used in “The Longhair.” In contrast to the fi rst section, in which Abel’s fragmented memory emphasizes his dislocation, Francisco’s memories resonate with the rhythmic wholeness Abel discovers in ritual. Burying his grandfather according to tradition, joining the dawn runners, and, fi nally, intoning the Navajo Night Chant as he sprints across the desert, Abel discovers a way to articulate himself, to connect with something vital and meaningful: “He was running and under his breath he began to sing. There was no sound, and he had no voice; he had only the words of the song.” The form of House Made of Dawn mirrors Abel’s engagement with ceremony, myth, and oral tradition. The text itself presents an alternative to Benally’s connection with the Night Chant. Unlike Benally, who treats the ceremony as a relic independent of and irrelevant to contemporary America, Momaday shows it can be incorporated into modernity. Opening and closing with identical images—Abel running—the narrative is circular. Momaday encourages us to reconsider simplistic notions of linear time, notions that Benally harbors when he wonders why anyone would want to live on the reservation, since that lifestyle had been “surpassed” by industrialization and consumerism. Momaday rejects this idea. Through memory, imagination, and ritual, the

past comes to life, overlapping with the present and future. Time, like the narrative, is circular. Once Abel realizes this, he no longer feels alienated. He becomes a part of something much larger than his pain-fi lled present. For Momaday, the oral tradition captures the potential of human imagination. Through an unending process of telling, listening, and retelling, oral forms adapt according to a culture’s present needs. The oral tradition connects listeners with a past, but the connection is dynamic rather than static. Momaday invokes the oral tradition with the novel’s fi rst and last words: Dypolah and Qtsedaba are traditional signals Jemez storytellers use to open and close a mythical tale. With House Made of Dawn Momaday blends the modern novel and ancient oral customs; through his imagination, we witness Abel as he struggles to heal. House Made of Dawn is an enigmatic narrative that renders the beauty and pain of the Native American experience. Drawn into a strange world of wondrous images and beautiful language, we take on the story. As we grapple with the novel’s time shifts, narrative breaks, omissions, and poetic language, we know Abel’s homesickness: the desire to be elsewhere in a world that demands conformity and denies difference, a world where hope lies in the not-sodistant horizon, where we, as does Abel, behold the breathtaking light of dawn.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Although a comic character, Tosamah tells the story of his Kiowa grandmother with reverence. The story mirrors the one Momaday tells of his own grandmother in the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain. Read the prologue and introduction of The Way to Rainy Mountain. How does this alter your interpretation of Tosamah? How does it change your idea of Momaday? 2. Using an encyclopedia and/or a reliable Web site, identify key passages in House Made of Dawn that allude to or quote the Night Chant and explain their significance to the novel, especially Abel’s healing process (the fourth day of the Night Chant, which Momaday uses in House

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Made of Dawn, can be found in a number of places, including online at http://www.sacredtexts.com/nam/nav/nmps/nmps06.htm). How does familiarity with the Night Chant deepen your understanding of House Made of Dawn? 3. Some readers have interpreted the albino as a symbolic representation of white society, concluding that House Made of Dawn portrays both as intrinsically evil. Most Momaday scholars, however, reject this reading as overly simplistic and misguided. Analyze the albino’s character, paying special attention to both the Santiago feast and murder scenes in “The Longhair.” What is the significance, if any, of the albino’s skin color? What do you think the novel says about American race relations? 4. In very different ways, House Made of Dawn and John Woo’s 2002 fi lm Windtalkers explore Native American involvement in World War II. Watch the fi lm, taking note of its portrayal Navajo soldiers. How does this representation compare with Abel’s experiences and memories? Why does Woo concentrate on the Navajos’ wartime heroics, while Momaday focuses on the years that follow?

The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) Published just one year after his Pulitzer Prize– winning novel House Made of Dawn, Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain is widely regarded as his greatest work. Thematically, both works deal with alienation, personal identity, place, and the oral tradition; however, the texts differ in two important ways. First, unlike House Made of Dawn, which is set in the American Southwest and incorporates aspects of Navajo culture, The Way to Rainy Mountain is set on the southern Plains and focuses on the Kiowa culture. Second, The Way to Rainy Mountain is not a novel. Part myth, part ethnographic commentary, part autobiography, and experimental in form, The Way to Rainy Mountain defies the categories we usually use for literary works. Part of the work’s originality derives from its unusual style; however, its reexamination of

both Euro-American and Native American culture marks its uniqueness. Encouraged to excel in the U.S. educational system, Momaday had, until his early thirties, focused his intellectual energy on learning Western history and poetic forms. In 1963, having just completed a Ph.D. in a traditional English literature program, Momaday suddenly realized that, by spending his formative years studying Western cultural forms, he had ignored the Kiowa legacy. Grounded in a rich history of tradition and myth, the Kiowa culture was decimated not only by the U.S. military assault on Native Americans in the decades after the Civil War but also by a century of forced assimilation. Upon leaving Stanford, Momaday followed the advice of his graduate school mentor, Yvor Winters, who stressed the importance of grasping one’s personal history. For Momaday, this meant uncovering his Kiowa roots. The Way to Rainy Mountain is Momaday’s attempt to learn this background, to understand how it has shaped him, and to probe its potential for exposing his readers to an alternate way of conceiving reality. As with House Made of Dawn, Momaday began writing The Way to Rainy Mountain several years prior to publishing it. In this case, the work took shape over the course of six years, beginning in 1963, when Aho, Momaday’s grandmother, told him that the most sacred Kiowa relic, Tai-me, was still in existence. With Aho and his father, Al, Momaday set out for Oklahoma to view the Tai-me bundle. He would later describe the incident as “the most intensely religious experience” he had ever had. Shortly thereafter, Aho died, prompting Momaday to return to Oklahoma, where he visited the Rainy Mountain cemetery near Lawton, the fi nal resting place for many Kiowa elders. Together, these experiences instilled in Momaday a passion to learn about his tribal forebears. As part of his research, he retraced the early 18th-century Kiowa migration route from the mountains of southern Montana to the plains of western Oklahoma. The more he delved into his cultural past, the more he felt compelled to write about it. While the decision to recover the Kiowa story was easy, the actual recovery proved difficult. Bound

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up in a web of oral myths and legends, the history of the Kiowa has not been well preserved. Such is the nature of oral traditions: Without storytellers, the stories fade. Through education, the U.S. government encouraged American Indians to speak English instead of their native tongue, to believe scientific explanations of natural phenomena instead of mythical ones, and to accept the Euro-American version of history instead of their tribe’s. By the time Momaday undertook the recuperation project, little material, written or spoken, remained. Further complicating matters, Momaday did not speak Kiowa. This meant he had to rely on a translator for conducting interviews and deciphering the few remaining written records, a responsibility that fell to Momaday’s father, Al, who not only collaborated with Momaday throughout the research and composition process but also drew several illustrations included in The Way to Rainy Mountain. Although the language and subject matter present no major difficulties to the reader, the text’s intricate and stylized structure can be daunting. Because the work lacks a conventional form, the structure is key to understanding how the many fragments unify into a cohesive whole. The prose portion of the text begins with a prologue and introduction, proceeds in three chapterlike movements, and concludes with an epilogue. Two short poems, “Headwaters” and “Rainy Mountain Cemetery,” bookend the work, capturing several themes Momaday explores in the middle. Describing a primordial energy, “Headwaters” evokes a creative beginning. Using the imagery of silence and death, “Rainy Mountain Cemetery” evokes a destructive end. The fi rst quatrain of “Headwaters” depicts a marshy woodland in which a hollow, weather-stained log lies on the forest floor. In the second quatrain, Momaday employs a rhythmic cadence to portray an unknown “archaic force,” which disrupts the scene’s peacefulness. We are not told what the force is or what it signifies. The poem asks, “What moves?” The prologue answers, “The Kiowas.” Their existence, Momaday writes, began and ended with two struggles: the fi rst to escape a hollow log, where, according to their creation myth, they entered the world; the second to survive in a world turned upside down by

white hunters and soldiers. When, between 1874 and 1886, hide hunters reduced the buffalo population from 30 million to less than 1,000, hunters destroyed not only the Kiowas’ principal source of food and shelter but also its cultural identity. The Way to Rainy Mountain focuses on the interim period between the Kiowa tribe’s mythic beginning and its historical end, a period of “great adventure and nobility and fulfi llment.” As its title indicates, the book concerns a journey, or more precisely, several journeys. Some of these journeys are physical: the Kiowa migration in the early 18th century to Rainy Mountain, a knoll that rises out of the Oklahoma plain; Momaday’s own trips to see the Tai-me bundle, to interview Kiowa elders, and to retrace the original Kiowa southern route. Other journeys are metaphorical. An important Kiowa landmark, Rainy Mountain symbolizes the culture and knowledge Momaday wants to recover. By writing the book, he begins an odyssey of self-exploration, seeking a personal identity in the traditions Rainy Mountain represents. This journey, however, is not merely personal. As Momaday writes, The way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself. . . . The verbal tradition by which it has been preserved has suffered a deterioration in time. What remains is fragmentary: mythology, legend, lore, and hearsay—and of course the idea itself, as crucial and complete as it ever was. That is the miracle.

For Momaday, the erosion of Kiowa culture is part of a broader decay of human imagination, which Western society deemphasizes in favor of scientific and historical fact. Part of what makes us human, part of what makes life worth living, resides in our common need to tell stories about the world and ourselves in order to make sense of both. Thus, The Way to Rainy Mountain becomes the very thing it triumphs: The work is an act of imagination, one that synthesizes Western and Kiowa forms of knowledge into a cohesive worldview. For Momaday, imagination and storytelling link people with the land they inhabit. Understanding

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a culture requires understanding the culture’s relationship to its surroundings. Momaday establishes these ideas in the introduction. Combining his grandmother’s traditional Kiowa stories with his own imaginative interpretation of the land between Montana and Oklahoma, Momaday sketches the relationship between the southern Plains and Kiowa tribal identity. It was not until they migrated from the Yellowstone Mountains to the areas in northern Texas, western Oklahoma, southern Kansas, and eastern Colorado that the Kiowa became Kiowa. Leaving behind the confinement of the mountains, where they were “bent and blind in the wilderness,” they developed a talent for horse riding and a reverence for the Sun and buffalo, the central emblems of the Kiowa religion. “The sun,” Momaday writes, “is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god.” The holy regard the Kiowa held for the Sun, now “all but gone out of mankind,” occupied the central place in their ceremonies, the most important of which was the sacred Sun Dance. Calling for a buffalo sacrifice, the ritual was last performed in 1887, when the U.S. government outlawed it as an act of barbarism. By then the buffalo, the animal representation of the Sun, were nearly extinct. The only personal link Momaday had with the Sun Dance died with his grandmother; Aho was seven when she attended the ceremony. Although the Kiowa still have the Tai-me bundle, the sacred Sun Dance fetish, Momaday confesses that his grandmother’s house and the culture it embodied for him have grown silent. Only imagination and memory can break the silence, a task Momaday undertakes in the text’s central section, which he divides into three movements—“The Setting Out,” “The Going On,” and “The Closing In.” Taken together, these movements pay homage to the past while building hope for the future. Momaday separates each movement into several units of three paragraphs, or triads. Although the thematic content of the triads varies, they share a formulaic structure. The fi rst paragraph is mythological and employs the cadence and diction of oral storytelling. The second is anthropological or historical; its style is precise and impersonal. The third paragraph is biographical

and lyrical. Each paragraph reflects upon the other two, sometimes in ways the reader may struggle to discern. The Way to Rainy Mountain forces readers to make their own connections, compelling them to use their own imagination. The fi rst paragraph in each triad reestablishes myth, legend, and lore as legitimate explanations for reality. Rather than oppose the fi rst paragraph, the second paragraph complements it, augmenting each myth or legend with a historical fact about the Kiowa. Momaday culled many of these facts from white anthropologists such as James Mooney and Alice Marriott. The third paragraph synthesizes the fi rst two. Poetically crafted and rendered in the fi rst person, the third paragraph integrates two different ways of seeing the world. The result is a book that reflects Momaday’s Native American and non–Native American experiences, memories, and identity. The Way to Rainy Mountain proceeds chronologically. Each of the text’s movements treats a period of Kiowa history, both factual and mythical. In 11 triads, “The Setting Out” traces Kiowa origin, beginning with the tribe’s mythic emergence from a hollow log. The myths in this section often seem thematically unrelated: One explains how dogs came to the Kiowas; another recounts the origin of Tai-me; four others proceed serially, filling out the Kiowa lineage in relation to a personified Sun god. Many of the “Setting Out” stories (myths) attempt to explain something’s cause. As disparate from one another as these stories are, they share a common feature: Each deals with Kiowa culture before it developed the identity of its “golden age,” a period that began in the mid-18th century when the Kiowa arrived in the southern Plains and reached its peak around 1830, and then declined gradually until 1875, when tribal leaders surrendered to U.S. soldiers at Fort Mill, Oklahoma. Momaday orders the second movement, “The Going On,” around the golden age. This section depicts a fully formed, elaborate culture, one made up of brave warriors, skilled riders, expert arrow makers, and clever tricksters. Their mythological origins established, the Kiowa stories in “The Going On” portray a selfassured, powerful, and free people. Although one might expect the fi nal movement, “The Closing

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In,” to treat the Kiowa imprisonment and cultural collapse, Momaday takes a subtle tack, representing the decline as a gradual depletion of tribal memory. Beginning with the story of two courageous brothers, each story that follows is less assured than the one preceding it. They also proceed from a legendary, unspecified time to the present. The mythic and legendary give way to the personal. In the next to the last anecdote, Momaday’s grandmother, Aho, is the central figure. The last living elder Momaday knows, Aho witnesses the unexplained yet symbolic toppling of Tai-me while visiting the relic’s official keeper. In the fi nal triad, Momaday’s perspective takes over. He assumes responsibility for not only the third paragraph’s synthesis but also the fi rst paragraph’s oral story and the second’s factual description. The oral tradition becomes his, and significantly, he begins the fi rst and third paragraphs with an identical opening phrase, “East of my grandmother’s house . . .” Although The Way to Rainy Mountain is a deeply personal work, Momaday wanted it to resonate with others. Abandoning the inward reflective style of the other biographical anecdotes, Momaday concludes “The Closing In” with an appeal: Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. . . . He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience. . . . He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season. . . . He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

Momaday returns to several key themes in this passage: the link between imagination and the landscape, the connection between one’s personal identity and a sense of place, and the ability of memory to enliven the past. One theme, however, is new: Momaday shifts from personal recollection to moral prescription. Set off by He ought constructions, the last triad ends with several moral directives. For Momaday, a person forms an authentic sense of self only when he or she identifies with a particular place. Otherwise, the individual remains incomplete.

Momaday prevents readers from taking comfort in the idea of a simple retreat into nature. Death imagery dominates the epilogue and closing poem, “Rainy Mountain Cemetery,” in which Momaday stands silent before his grandmother’s gravestone. As somber as the closing poem is, The Way to Rainy Mountain is not a simple lamentation or yearning for the past. The epilogue demonstrates how the Plains Indian culture, though no longer physically active, continues to thrive in his imagination. KoSahn, an “old-old” woman, among the last to have experienced the 1887 Sun Dance, is probably dead. Yet, her story lives in Momaday’s mind; her memory becomes his, which he keeps alive by retelling it. In the process of recovering Kiowa culture, Momaday reveals it not as an artifact for silent viewing but as alive, adapting, changing, and carried on in his own imagination. As so many of his works do, The Way to Rainy Mountain deals with identity and the way that Momaday and we use language to understand the present, shape our future, and recover the past.

For Discussion or Writing 1. A committed environmentalist, Momaday has written several essays in favor of conservation. Focusing on legal and political arguments, research the present-day U.S. conservation movement. Then, read Momaday’s essay “An American Land Ethic” (The Man Made of Words 1997), noting the similarities and differences in their reasoning. Are Momaday’s arguments supporting conservation more persuasive than the arguments offered by many environmentalists? How does your reading of The Way to Rainy Mountain shape your views? 2. Although myth and legend are often conflated in everyday conversation, literary scholars distinguish between the two. Myths are stories involving sacred and/or supernatural beings. They are integrated into the religious or spiritual tapestry of a community and encode the cultural worldview of a people, setting parameters for acceptable behavior. Legends, though similar, usually have a discernible factual link but a weaker connection to the divine. Reread the fi rst paragraph of each triad, deciding whether the story quali-

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fies as myth, legend, or neither. Next, identify at least two myths and two legends from your own culture. Compare and contrast the similarities and differences between your own cultural myths and legends and those you encounter in The Way to Rainy Mountain. Do your own myths and legends seem more plausible? If so, would an outsider agree with you?

The Names: A Memoir (1976) In the 1970 essay “The Man Made of Words,” Momaday wrote, “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists of our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined” (55). Six years after publishing these words, Momaday released his autobiography, The Names: A Memoir, a chronicle of his youth and adolescence. With this work, he imagines himself, creating a Kiowa poet identity. The Names consists of an explanatory introduction, a prologue, four main sections, and an epilogue. Part 1 describes Momaday’s ancestry and establishes his multicultural roots. He introduces several colorful characters, giving equal weight to his mother’s Scottish, French, and Cherokee forebears and his father’s Kiowa lineage. Part 2 chronicles Momaday’s boyhood as he adjusts to life in Arizona and New Mexico. Living among the Navajo and Pueblo peoples, Momaday melds the Plains and Southwest cultures and landscape. In part 3, Momaday describes his struggle to accommodate confl icting worldviews. As he grows older, his worldly awareness expands; his psyche grows more tortured. Momaday captures the pain and confusion in stream of consciousness, a narrative technique that attempts to approximate the patterns of thought by abandoning conventional punctuation and narrative progression. Finally, part 4 explores Momaday’s life in Jemez, New Mexico, where he spent the remainder of his adolescent years. As Momaday’s other prose works do, The Names demands much of its readers. Instead of giving a

straightforward account of his life, Momaday creates a collage of memories, myths, landscapes, and lengthy commentary. As with House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain, frequent digressions make it difficult to piece together events in chronological order. Sometimes readers struggle to separate “reality” from imagination, what “actually” happened from what transpired in Momaday’s mind. Each of these techniques mirrors the novel’s function, demonstrating the complexities involved in forming an identity. Using himself as the example, Momaday illustrates how we are more than our experiences in the physical world and how our memories, desires, wants, needs, and pains help form our sense of self. As with Momaday’s other works, the structure of The Names provides important clues to the text’s meaning. By arranging the book into four major sections, Momaday invokes a sacred number. For many Native American cultures, the number 4 represents the seasons and cardinal directions, which, taken together, symbolize balance, beauty, and harmony. In a certain respect The Names documents Momaday’s internal search for balance and beauty, a search that, if completed, will uncover his inner Kiowa spirit. The question for Momaday is, What connects me to a culture from which I have been separated since infancy? The answer: language, myth, and imagination. Momaday emphasizes the importance of language in the memoir’s opening line: “My name is Tsoai-talee. I am, therefore, Tsoaitalee; therefore I am.” The passage reworks René Descartes’s famous dictum, “I think, therefore, I am.” Descartes, a 17th-century French philosopher and one of the premier figures of the Enlightenment, was also worried about identity but in a much broader sense. Unlike Momaday, Descartes wanted to establish foundational truths about human existence. The phrase I am, however, has a much more personal meaning for Momaday. It does not simply mean “I exist,” but rather “I am connected to something meaningful; my identity is secured; I understand who I am.” Although Momaday’s Indian name, Tsoai-talee, is only a word, it is his principal bond to the Kiowa tribe and its rich mythic tradition. Given to him by a Kiowa elder

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when Momaday was only six months old, the name translates as “Rock-tree Boy” and unites him with a mythical boy-turned-bear. Many of the most poignant passages in The Names explore language’s potential to bridge the distance between individuals and communities. Momaday fi nds in the word Tsaoi-talee an enduring connection to the Kiowa community. Similar connections occur throughout, for instance, when he “talks” to ancestors who lived and died centuries ago. Of course, the text itself is Momaday’s most ambitious deployment of language as a unifying force. “And I wonder at the words,” Momaday ruminates. “What are they? They stand, they lean and run upon the page of a manuscript. . . . I trace the words; I touch myself to the words, and they stand for me. My mind lives among them, moving ever, ever going on. I lay the page aside, I imagine.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. As its subtitle indicates, The Names is a memoir, a literary form in which the writer turns personal experience into a narrative (mémoire is French for “memory”). Yet, Momaday does not simply “remember” events from his youth and recount them in this work. Instead, he explores different kinds of “memory,” expanding the concept to include not only his own experiences but also those of his ancestors and even Kiowa myths and legends. Why does Momaday intersperse his own childhood recollections with his forebears’? Can one “remember” something that occurred when he or she was not present or did not occur at all? Think of some of your earliest childhood memories and analyze them for “truth.” Is there a difference between actual and imagined memory? Does it matter? What would Momaday say to this question? Support your answer with passages from the text. 2. What do you think of Momaday’s idea that we become what we imagine? Are there other factors outside our imaginations that shape who

we are and how we see ourselves? If so, what are they? Can imagination override these factors?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON MOMADAY AND HIS WORK 1. Momaday is frequently cited as a seminal figure in the Native American renaissance. What are the pros and cons of classifying Momaday as a “Native American” writer rather than simply an “American” writer, or even just a “writer”? 2. Although Momaday’s prose is more widely read than his poetry, Momaday identifies as a poet fi rst and a prose stylist second. Momaday treated many if not all his central concerns in both genres. Read “Angle of Geese,” “The Bear,” “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee,” and/or a poem of your choosing. Compare the images, styles, and concerns with those of one of his prose works. What similarities do you notice? What differences? 3. Momaday is perhaps best known for his ability to fuse two divergent literary legacies, Western literature and Native American oral traditions. With this in mind, compare Momaday to a writer who influenced him. Choose one work by each author. How is Momaday indebted to him or her? In what ways does Momaday depart from him or her? Discuss similarities and differences in style, characterization, and narrative technique. Possibilities include, but are not limited to, The Names and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa; House Made of Dawn and R ALPH ELLISON’s Invisible Man or William Faulkner’s Light in August or “The Bear” (from Go Down, Moses); The Way to Rainy Mountain and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature.” WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Allen, Paula Gunn, ed. Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. New York: MLA, 1983.

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Bloom, Harold, ed. Native American Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Brill de Ramírez, Susan Berry. Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Brumble, H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Fleck, Richard F., ed. Critical Perspective on Native American Literature. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1993. Isernhagen, Hartwig. Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Krupat, Arnold. The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Larson, Charles. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Lundquist, Suzanne. Native American Literatures: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004. Momaday, N. Scott. The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. ———. The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997. “N. Scott Momaday (1934– ).” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www. english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/momaday/ momaday.htm. Accessed March 25, 2009. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

Porter, Joy, and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Roemer, Kenneth M., ed. Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. New York: MLA, 1988. Scarberry-García, Susan. Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Schubnell, Mathias. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Schubnell, Mathias, ed. Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Swann, Brian, and Arnold Krupat, eds. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Trimble, Martha Scott. N. Scott Momaday. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College Press, 1973. Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Wiget, Andrew, ed. Critical Essays on American Indian Literature. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. ———. Handbook of Native American Literature. New York: Garland, 1996. Winters, Yvor. Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English. Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1967. Witherspoon, Gary. Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977.

J. Earen Rast

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. (“Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”)

M

ary Flannery O’Connor, the only child of Edward Francis and Regina Cline O’Connor, was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925. For 12 years Flannery O’Connor’s imagination formed in this city steeped in southern tradition, a city of blossoming magnolias, soaring oaks, hanging moss, public parks, monuments, and the impressive Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Savannah’s Roman Catholic community nurtured the young Flannery, who, growing up with devout parents, developed a strong faith in her early years, a faith to which she held dearly for the rest of her life and upon which she reflected in her fiction, essays, reviews, and lectures. Influenced by Savannah’s historical culture and educated in parochial schools, O’Connor developed an appreciation for southern culture and a disciplined, educated mind. Despite her relatively sheltered childhood, her artistic vision grew to embrace universal humanity, which she depicted through a regional lens and in a grotesque “southern gothic” style. In early 1938, after he was diagnosed with lupus, the autoimmune disease from which he would die just three years later, Edward Francis O’Connor took a job with the Federal Housing Administration in Atlanta. Regina and Flannery stayed in Atlanta for only one year, long enough for Flannery to complete seventh grade at a parochial school. At the end of the school term Flannery and her mother moved to the small Georgia town of Milledgeville

to live in the Cline home, her mother’s birthplace and home to the family since before the Civil War. O’Connor’s father remained in Atlanta during the week and traveled to Milledgeville on weekends. Although the O’Connor family remained members of a close-knit Catholic community, Milledgeville exposed O’Connor to rural southern culture and to Protestant Christianity. O’Connor excelled at Peabody High School, a public school, where she wrote and illustrated books in her spare time. O’Connor graduated the year after her father died and enrolled in what is now Georgia College and State University (then the Georgia State College for Women), where she majored in English and social science. She edited the school newspaper, the yearbook, and the literary quarterly, the Corinthian. During this time she submitted cartoons to the New Yorker, which, despite giving her strong encouragement, never published her work. O’Connor’s many successes at the Georgia State College for Women convinced her to take up writing as a profession. In fall 1945, at the encouragement of her philosophy professor, George Beiswanger, O’Connor submitted writing she had done for the Corinthian and was awarded a Rinehart Fellowship at the Iowa School for Writers. While it is now common to study creative writing in graduate school, it was not in 1945. The Iowa School for Writers was one of the fi rst such programs in the United States; for 20 years

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the school had allowed students to submit creative work for master’s degrees. O’Connor’s thesis, “The Geranium: A Collection of Short Stories” (1947), contained six works. Of these, “The Geranium” was published in the summer 1946 issue of Accent. During her stay at Iowa, O’Connor met and received advice from a number of visiting authors, including John Crowe Ransom, ROBERT P ENN WARREN, and Allen Tate, whose fi rst wife, Caroline Gordon, became O’Connor’s mentor, later guiding her as she wrote the fi rst of her two novels, Wise Blood (1952), which O’Connor began at the Yaddo Artist Colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. She stayed there after graduation from Iowa and then lived briefly in New York City. In February 1949 R OBERT L OWELL introduced her to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds, who shared her Catholic faith, became two of O’Connor’s closest friends; they provided a refuge for O’Connor to work in their Connecticut home. Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations of Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles remain among the fi nest in English, introduced O’Connor to many works of literature and endowed her with an appreciation for the great works of antiquity, especially Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. For the rest of her life she corresponded with the Fitzgeralds. After O’Connor’s death, Robert served as O’Connor’s literary executor and published Mystery and Manners (1969), a collection of O’Connor’s lectures and magazine articles. After Robert died, Sally collected many of O’Connor’s letters in The Habit of Being (1979). She also edited material for O’Connor’s Collected Works (1988) and lectured on O’Connor’s life and writings. In 1949 O’Connor’s health began to deteriorate. That same year she traveled to Milledgeville for kidney surgery. She returned briefly to Connecticut, where she completed a draft of Wise Blood but became desperately ill on a return train trip to Milledgeville in December 1950. At that time, O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had claimed her father’s life some 10 years before. Systemic lupus erythematosus is a chronic immune disease in which a person’s immune system

attacks the body’s healthy tissue, causing inflammation throughout the body, damage to internal organs, and persistent pain. Upon receiving the diagnosis, O’Connor returned to Milledgeville and moved with her mother to a dairy farm they called “Andalusia.” Although O’Connor continued to work until the time of her death in 1964, she never permanently left the farm. Four chapters of Wise Blood were published in Mademoiselle, the Sewanee Review, and the Partisan Review in 1948 and 1949; the complete work appeared in print in 1952. Often compared with William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses for its depiction of regional characters and compared with Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts for its grotesque, darkly comic qualities and spiritual subject matter, Wise Blood received unsympathetic criticism. Most reviewers complained that the novel’s strange plot and bizarre characters were difficult to understand. Nevertheless, soon after Wise Blood’s publication, O’Connor began to work on another novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960). O’Connor took the title from the Douay translation of Matthew 11:12 in the Bible: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.” As do Wise Blood and many of her short stories, The Violent Bear It Away contained violence leading to spiritual awakenings. Partly because of her physical limitations and partly because of the difficulty of taking on another novel, O’Connor returned to writing stories. Between fall 1952 and mid-1955, she labored on A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), a collection of 10 stories, many of which—the title piece, “The Displaced Person,” “The Artificial Nigger,” and “Good Country People”—critics maintain are among her fi nest writing. At Andalusia, O’Connor lived a simple life, writing two to three hours every morning, eating with her mother, writing letters, and watching the farm animals, including her pet peacocks. She did make several short trips, delivering public readings of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and lecturing at such respected institutions as Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, and the University of Chicago. She also made pilgrimages

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to Lourdes and to Rome, where, in May 1958, she had an audience with Pope Pius XII. Throughout her struggle with lupus, O’Connor received massive doses of cortisone. While the treatments enabled her to function, they also weakened her bones. By fall 1953 her hip joints had become so weak that she had to use crutches. Fighting lupus and increasingly concerned about the negative reviews she received, O’Connor wrote darker tales. She also became further disillusioned about modern society, which she considered as fallen. Despite what was for all practical purposes a long bout with depression, she held fast to the Catholic faith and, especially during her fi nal years, read and reviewed theological texts, most notably those of the French priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In a 1960 book review O’Connor called Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (1959) the most important book published in the last three decades. Teilhard de Chardin envisioned a divine center of convergence, a conception of spiritual evolution at work in history. O’Connor drew upon his ideas when compiling the posthumously published Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965), which included, in addition to the title story, “The Enduring Chill,” “Revelation,” “Greenleaf,” and “The Lame Shall Enter First.” The characters in these stories, in one way or another, resist convergence, the pull of God’s grace. Yet, many of the characters have a chance at redemption after their false selves have been stripped away, often in dramatic, violent scenes. Throughout her works O’Connor focused on religious themes and often depicted life in the largely Protestant South. Pinning down O’Connor’s specific theological stance, however, is difficult to do. Her ironic, grotesque, and violent texts, which capture a time of social unrest and radical change in southern culture, do not yield easy interpretations and are not easily reduced to a specific theology. O’Connor had little patience with religious dogmatism yet often created evangelical Protestant characters who, like her, were fi lled with a burning desire for transcendence. O’Connor remains not only one of the most significant figures in modern southern fiction but also

one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Her short stories are considered models of the art form. Because of her use of grotesque or “southern gothic” style, which she achieved by blending the humorous and the horrible, the absurd and the tragic, her works present challenging paradoxes. She is known for her religious thinking, which has tempted many to read her works as Christian allegories, and for her comic vision, often presented through everyday characters, dramatic irony, a playful tone, and absurd situations. O’Connor’s representation of African Americans and of racial confl icts during the civil rights era have sparked critical controversy. Alice Walker, for example, expressed her critical reservations and ambivalent feeling about O’Connor in “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor” (In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens 1983). Walker, after critiquing O’Connor’s letters and personal statements, was disturbed by O’Connor’s use of racist language and her lack of explicit statements on racial injustice. Nevertheless, Walker concedes that the “essential O’Connor is not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming, as it does, out of such a racial culture” (53). Ultimately Walker concludes that “whether one ‘understands’ [O’Connor’s] fiction or not, one knows that her characters are new and wondrous creations in the world and that not one of her stories . . . could have been written by anyone else” (56). Despite having written relatively little—two novels, two collections of short stories, and a few occasional pieces of nonfiction—O’Connor crafted language of such originality that her works continue to be read and studied. If, as Harold Bloom has said, one of the hallmarks of great literature is its “strangeness,” then few other American writers have created such a bizarre collection of works. With a sharp eye for detail, a keen ability to depict common humanity, and a wildly comic imagination, O’Connor rendered what she called “the Christ-haunted South.” Filled with religious fervor and the ability to record the region’s oddities—its exaggerations, its dialects, its resistance to change, its social contradictions, its contentious race relations—O’Connor captured the South at a time of

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radical change. The portrait she paints could only have been created by one of the country’s master parodists. In 39 short years, Flannery created unforgettable characters and masterfully crafted short stories, earning her a permanent place in the American literary canon.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953) Debuting in Modern Writing I (1953), “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the title piece of O’Connor’s fi rst collection of short stories, was published by Harcourt, Brace in June 1955. A comic story with a tragic ending, the story begins with a family traveling from Atlanta to Florida on vacation with grandmother in tow. Along the way the unnamed grandmother convinces her son, Bailey, to take an unplanned detour to a plantation she remembers from her youth. Hearing the grandmother’s romantic tales about the house, the grandchildren grow excited and nag Bailey until he agrees to deviate from his intended route. Moments later, the grandmother realizes they are nowhere near the plantation, which exists not in Georgia, but in Tennessee. Out of embarrassment, she fidgets nervously and disturbs Pitty Sing, the family cat she stowed secretly in a basket on the car’s floorboard. Startled, the cat leaps onto Bailey’s shoulder, causing him to crash into a ditch. Although the family walks away from the accident with minor injuries, the “Misfit,” an escaped felon, and his henchmen arrive and execute the family members one by one. While this plot sounds morbid, the story is fi lled with dark, grotesque humor created largely by the story’s many ironies. For example, in the fi rst paragraph the grandmother vows not to take her children near the Misfit, whose crime spree she has been following in the newspaper, yet her detour pushes the family into direct contact with the man she seeks to avoid. As do many of O’Connor’s works, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” deals with good and evil and the action of grace. From a Roman Catholic theological perspective, grace is a gift freely given by God, but one that humans, by exercising free

will, can and often do reject. Her characters, who sometimes accept and other times reject salvation, often have a warped self-image, especially of their moral status and of the morality of their actions. Thus, on the surface, the grandmother professes to live a good life, yet the reader encounters her as a manipulative figure, one who is obstinate, inconsiderate, and determined to get her way. By telling the story from a third-person limited omniscient perspective, O’Connor enables the reader to question the grandmother’s words and actions, which rarely align. She says one thing but then does another. She belittles her grandchildren; chides her daughter-inlaw; refers to an underprivileged black child by a racial epithet, as a “pickaninny,” revealing her prejudicial view of race relations; and then proceeds to negotiate her life by both flattering the Misfit and attempting to make him feel guilty. On one level the story chronicles her movement toward grace, a movement that occurs in the fi nal scene when she comes to terms with her own mortality and need for salvation. The grandmother’s fi nal words signal the possibility of a spiritual awakening; she tells the Misfit, “You’re one of my own children,” a comment that causes the Misfit to recoil in horror “as if a snake had bitten him” before shooting her three times in the chest. Were this the only way of interpreting the story, then “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” would be little more than a theological essay containing a dogmatic message. Even though told from the grandmother’s perspective, the story contains many voices, one of the most interesting of which is the Misfit’s, which echoes in the story’s ambiguous conclusion. For the Misfit, life is pointless. Although he seems to be a man of modest means, the Misfit philosophizes and theologizes as the story concludes. He weighs life’s meaning and purpose. The Misfit begins his theological tract by commenting on the arbitrary nature of salvation, ruminating on the two thieves whose crosses stood next to Jesus’: “Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all?” This theological question is the same one that obsesses Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot, a play in which two vaudevillelike bums—Estragon and Vladimir—

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debate why one thief is saved and another, without explanation, is condemned. Here the Misfit appears as a modern nihilist who views the ambiguity at the heart of human life as an indication that life has no meaning. When the grandmother, searching for words that will spare her life, pleads, “Jesus,” the Misfit exclaims, “Jesus thrown everything off balance,” comparing himself with the Son of God. According to the Misfit, Jesus’ actions create a theological quandary. “If he did what he said,” according to the Misfit, “then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him,” echoing Jesus’ command to his disciples. While according to Christian orthodoxy this command to follow Jesus grants life purpose, for the Misfit this exhortation leaves all human life empty, leaving literally “nothing for you to do” but follow blindly, accepting that meaning and purpose lie beyond human understanding. The Misfit continues his philosophical reflection by commenting that if Jesus did not raise the dead, “then it’s nothing for you to do but to enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down the house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.” This second proposition describes a world devoid of Jesus’ saving grace. By erecting these two equally nihilistic poles, the Misfit makes bold assertions about human limitations and about the uncertainty of the human condition. On one level, then, he may be seen to represent a questioning agnostic, someone who does not know whether God exists and discerns no relevance of God’s existence to a broken world. On another level he may be viewed as a profound commentator on the nature of modernity, in which people endure without purpose or hope or belief or faith. Further complicating this issue, the Misfit may be seen an instrument of God, someone who induces the grandmother in her last moments to accept God’s grace and surrender her life in love. The story ends with a number of puzzling points to untangle. Is it possible for good to come out of evil? Is the Misfit truly an evil man, or, paradoxically, is he really an instrument of God, one whose violent acts bring about change, a radical, life-changing reorientation

to the nature of reality that a lost world needs? By withholding answers to these questions, O’Connor leaves the reader with serious interpretive challenges. While it may be easy to pronounce the story a theological message, O’Connor re-creates, through a fictive lens, philosophical issues that have plagued theologians for centuries and that occupy believers and nonbelievers alike. In this way the story comments on the difficulty of fi nding and defi ning goodness in a confused world, one where a good man is indeed hard to fi nd.

For Discussion or Writing 1. A complex literary device, irony is the use of language to imply something other than what is stated on the surface. Dramatic irony describes a situation in which the reader understands what is occurring or is privy to information and a character is not. After reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” one can detect the story’s many ironic elements. With that in mind, reread the story, noting the many times O’Connor employs irony. Locate ironic situations and discuss how O’Connor uses irony to complicate the story’s meaning(s). 2. Discuss the significance of the Misfit’s penultimate line in the story: “She would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” 3. Compare the Misfit’s discussion of the two thieves crucified with Jesus and Vladimir and Estragon’s debate on the same issue in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. What similarities and differences can be found? Can O’Connor’s text be seen to comment on Beckett’s? Why or why not?

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” (1953) “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” appeared in the Kenyon Review in spring 1953, two years before Harcourt, Brace published it in the O’Connor short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. It later appeared in the 1954 O. Henry Prize

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Stories and was sold to General Electric Playhouse, which performed the piece on February 1, 1956, with Gene Kelly in the role of the con artist (the televised version eliminated the troublesome ending and had the central character return for his bride). In the short story a drifter, Tom T. Shiftlet, appears at sunset on the farm of Mrs. Lucynell Crater, where, after convincing Mrs. Crater that he has noble intentions, he repairs a fence and hog pen; teaches her mute grown daughter, Lucynell, to say her fi rst word (bird); and then fi xes a broken-down automobile. When Mrs. Crater offers him her daughter’s hand in marriage and a sum of money, Shiftlet weds Lucynell, takes her on a road trip, and abandons her at the Hot Spot, a roadside diner. After he drives away, he picks up a hostile hitchhiker, who soon jumps out of the car. Storm clouds appear, and Shiftlet passes a common 1950s highway safety sign reading, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” As “fantastic raindrops, like tin-can tops” fall, Shiftlet steps on the gas and races the rain shower to Mobile. Significantly, the story is framed by two dramatic manifestations of nature: the setting of the Sun and the fury of a thunderstorm. One signals the arrival of Shiftlet; the other signals his speedy fl ight. Both provide religious imagery. In the fi rst, Mr. Shiftlet looks toward the Sun in a moment of adoration; his figure forms a “crooked cross.” In the second Shiftlet feels that “the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him,” and cries, “Oh Lord! . . . Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” just after a fleeing hitchhiker tells Shiftlet, “You go to the devil.” The central demonic figure of the story, Shiftlet neither displays awareness of nor feels remorse for treating others with malice. Interestingly, as with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor places prophetic, theological language in the mouth of the story’s villain. Just as the Misfit debates theological issues, so does Mr. Shiftlet comment on the rotten world and the human heart, much like the disillusioned protagonist does in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” Shiftlet also ruminates on the nature of the ever-shifting soul, admits to having a “moral intelligence,” raises theological concerns and ques-

tions, and, as do the chorus in Antigone and the prince of Denmark in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, comments on “what is man.” As with “Good Country People,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” deals with deception: the mutual games Mrs. Crater and Tom Shiftlet play, one passing off her 30-year-old mentally disabled daughter as 15 or 16, the other conning his way to someone’s money and automobile. They treat Mrs. Crater’s daughter as an object to be bartered and traded. Lucynell is an innocent being, an “angel of Gawd,” something Shiftlet and the waiter in the roadside café recognize. She is a potential agent of salvation, an angelic being with “eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck,” one of the many descriptions that compare her with the Virgin Mary. Yet, as with William Faulkner’s Benji in The Sound and the Fury, her presence cannot negate a rotten world in which Shiftlet, despite having his prayers answered and his desires fulfi lled, refuses to repent. The story ends without closure. Unlike “Good Country People,” in which O’Connor shifts perspective after the con man has made off with JoyHulga’s wooden leg, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” focuses solely on Shiftlet as he races down the road. After leaving Lucynell at the Hot Spot, he is “more depressed than ever,” a soul in torment. Lonely and fi lled with an ironic sense of remorse for someone who has just left his mute wife alone at a roadside diner in the middle of nowhere, Shiftlet picks up a hitchhiker because “he felt that a man with a car had a responsibility to others.” As he talks with the hitchhiker, Shiftlet creates an idealized portrait of his mother, one who taught him to pray, loved him, taught him right from wrong, and whom like Lucynell, an “angel of Gawd,” he abandoned. O’Connor is careful to show that he is a man of reason with a strong moral sense who freely chooses his immoral course. The story’s violent moment of awareness, common in O’Connor’s works, occurs when the hitchhiker responds, “You go to the devil! . . . My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking pole cat!” After the hitchhiker jumps out of the car, Mr. Shiftlet reflects and utters an emphatic prayer: “Oh Lord! . . . Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!” Ironically, his

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prayer is answered when storm clouds unleash their fury on him. Then Shiftlet steps on the gas, leaving responsibility and salvation behind. Although Shiftlet utters a prayer at the end of the story, he, unlike the mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” does not move toward grace. Instead, he speaks truths that resonate with the reader but that he himself neither accepts nor practices. Unable to save even himself, Shiftlet continues to wander lost. He chooses emptiness over fullness, all the while haunted by his need to connect with others, plagued by a profound lack of self-fulfi llment. He is literally deformed—he has one short arm—and spiritually bereft, a fallen figure who chooses freedom over responsibility, the road to death over the life that he can save.

For Discussion or Writing 1. O’Connor’s story is set in the 1950s, a time of materialism in which the automobile became increasingly important. Consider Tom Shiftlet’s obsession with both the automobile and money. Why are these things significant? How does O’Connor’s depiction of the automobile comment on postwar American society? 2. Like William Faulkner’s Benji in The Sound and the Fury, Lucynell Crater has a disability. Although the story does not state it explicitly, her lack of verbal skills, actions, and the narrator’s comment that Shiftlet tips his hat to her “as if she were not in the least way affl icted” suggest that she may be mentally handicapped. Consider O’Connor’s representation of the girl and of Joy-Hulga Hopewell’s disability in “Good Country People.” From a 21st-century perspective, is O’Connor’s representation of Lucynell charitable? Compare and contrast O’Connor’s and Faulkner’s portrayal of the disabled and how these characters contribute to their works. After you answer this question from a 21st-century perspective, consider it in terms of America in the 1950s. From your knowledge of mid-20thcentury America, would you answer the question the same way? With all of this in mind, is it

fair to hold authors accountable for the characters they create? 3. Evaluate O’Connor’s descriptions of the natural world in the story. How do these descriptions contribute to the story’s meaning(s)?

“A Circle in the Fire” (1954) “A Circle in the Fire” appeared in the Kenyon Review in 1954, one year before Harcourt, Brace published it in the O’Connor short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). That same year the story appeared in Prize Stories 1955: The O. Henry Awards and in The Best American Short Stories of 1955, helping to establish O’Connor as one of America’s most important short story writers. As with several of O’Connor’s works, “A Circle in the Fire” takes place presumably on a Georgia farm and involves outsiders who arrive mysteriously and disrupt the usually uneventful farm life, much like Manley Pointer in “Good Country People” and Tom T. Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” two other stories in the same collection. The three boys who arrive mysteriously at the Cope farm—the son of a former employee and his two friends from Atlanta—turn out to be arsonists who cause Mrs. Cope to realize her worst fears: that she will be disobeyed and her property, which she tends as she does her weeds and nut grass “as if they were evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place,” will be consumed by fi re. The story opens with a conversation between Mrs. Cope and Mrs. Pritchard, who works on the farm with her husband and daughter. Through Sally Virginia, Mrs. Cope’s 12-year-old daughter, who overhears their banter while eavesdropping from a second-story window in the house, the reader learns that the two women engage in cyclical conversations. As always Mrs. Pritchard, ever the pessimist, annoys Mrs. Cope, only to be irritated by Mrs. Cope’s daft optimism. After a short period the narrator exposes Mrs. Cope’s obsession with her property and material gain, an obsession neither Mrs. Pritchard nor the African-

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American farmworkers share. Thus, Mrs. Cope exists in an insular world, impervious to those who surround her. When the three boys arrive, the narrator conveys that Mrs. Cope views her black farm workers “as destructive and impersonal as the nut grass.” By observing Mrs. Cope’s “minions,” who share neither her zeal for productivity nor her false wisdom, industry, and religious devotion, the reader learns of Mrs. Cope’s darker side, one governed by self-righteousness, racism, and excessive pride. She is one of O’Connor’s self-consumed characters. Ironically, those who surround her possess greater wisdom, especially knowledge about human nature, than their hypocritical employer. It is significant that much of the story is told through the eyes of a child. An awakening character and a moral compass for the story, Sally Virginia decides to confront the boys in the woods but ultimately is unable to act. This perspective highlights Mrs. Cope’s naïveté; she, as does Sally Virginia, confronts the inability to control her life and the anxiety accompanying modern life, the undergirding presence shown on Mrs. Cope’s face in the fi nal paragraph: “It was a face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself.” In this moment, Sally Virginia also hears the prophetic voices of the boys in the distance. While literally the boys act as a foil and serve the role of antagonists in the story, they also function as symbolic representations whose significance lies in the embedded literary allusion O’Connor employs. The story’s title and fi nal scene are borrowed from the Book of Daniel, in which the tyrannical King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon throws three Jewish boys—Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego—into a fiery furnace. Miraculously, the three boys are spared by God’s intervention and are unharmed by the flames. The use of such biblical parallels is referred to as an allusion. In the biblical story the three boys are messengers from God who refuse to accede to Nebuchadnezzar’s decrees. O’Connor’s story portrays them less sympathetically, especially

as the reader’s take on the boys is conditioned by the thoughts of Sally Virginia, who is both an innocent child and an objective observer not yet pulled into the complex social world her mother and Mrs. Cope inhabit. Sally Virginia sees the boys as evil and wants to confront them, to eradicate their presence. Her strategy for confronting the boys directly opposes the passive way Mrs. Cope tries to deal with them. Yet ultimately, even though Sally Virginia intends to act, she is unable to do so. As the story ends, the reader senses that Mrs. Cope, despite all of her religious pretense and eternal optimism, has been an imprisoning force encircling the farm. As Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego do, the farmworkers refuse to be burned by Mrs. Cope. Unlike the biblical prophets, the farmworkers have longed for both Mrs. Cope’s and the farm’s demise. As with many of O’Connor’s tales, the violence shocks both Mrs. Cope and Sally Virginia into a sudden awareness. The fi re creates a theophanous revelation, an unfolding of the world’s frailty and vulnerability for Sally Virginia, but this revelation also unveils the arrogant blindness of Mrs. Cope, who comes to terms with herself as she fi nally beholds the fi re.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The historical context of “A Circle in the Fire” is important to consider. When “A Circle in the Fire” was published, the South was governed by the Jim Crow laws that relegated African Americans to lesser roles and often encouraged their mistreatment. After consulting an encyclopedia or trustworthy Web site that addresses civil rights abuses during this period and the impact of Jim Crow laws, assess the black characters in the story and the way Mrs. Cope treats them. Is O’Connor presenting social commentary, especially with the character Culver? Why or why not? 2. By making a parallel between her farm story and a biblical story, O’Connor uses a literary allusion, a reference by one text to another text. What is the significance of the biblical allusion from which O’Connor derives the story title and the

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fiery ending, in which Sally stands tall, listening to “a few wild shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them?” How does this allusion contribute to the story’s meaning?

“The Displaced Person” (1954, revised 1955) A short version of “The Displaced Person” was printed in the fall 1954 Sewanee Review. One year later, Harcourt, Brace published it in its revised, expanded, and fi nal form as part of O’Connor’s collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. As many of O’Connor’s stories do, “The Displaced Person” takes place on a rural farm where the presence of an outsider changes not only the way people on the farm live but also the way they think about the world. The farm owner, Mrs. McIntyre, a threetimes-married 60-year-old woman, worries about money and the general laziness of her workers. She has seen several generations of white farmhands come and go and has learned the ways of the black farmworkers, originally employed by Mrs. McIntyre’s fi rst, deceased husband, the Judge. Unlike other O’Connor stories in which outsiders are often con artists who manipulate gullible others, this story focuses on characters who are, in one way or another, displaced, meaning “they ain’t where they were born at and there’s nowhere for them to go.” The most notable of these displaced persons is a Polish émigré, Mr. Guizac, who, with his family, becomes the subject of gossip not only among the other farmworkers but also among xenophobic townsfolk who feel threatened by Guizac’s industriousness, pleasant demeanor, and foreign tongue. The story opens with a peacock that follows Mrs. Shortley, the wife of Mrs. McIntyre’s most recently hired farmhand, Chancey Shortley. O’Connor introduces the reader to the farm through the eyes of the ironically named Mrs. Shortley, who stands “on tremendous legs . . . with the self-confidence of a mountain” and peers through “two icy blue points of light,” “surveying everything.” The peacock appears throughout the story, always accompanied by descriptive language that hints at its symbolic

qualities. Although Mrs. McIntyre views the bird as another mouth to feed, the narrator shrouds the animal in mystery and makes it the object of Father Flynn’s affection. In this way, O’Connor frames the mundane world with the sacred, hinting at the grace-fi lled wonder of the bird that appears in a supernatural light as a black car appears on the horizon. O’Connor contrasts the peacock’s mystical presence with Mrs. Shortley’s worldly, skeptical, and fundamentalist thinking. The fi rst part of the story paints a picture of the farm, reveals the personalities of its inhabitants, and relates the Guizac family’s arrival. Father Flynn, who frequently visits Mrs. McIntyre with the aim of converting her to Catholicism, has driven out this day to deliver Mr. Guizac, whom Mrs. McIntyre hires to work on the farm. The fi rst section details how Mr. Guizac’s industriousness jeopardizes Shortley’s livelihood and how the Shortleys quickly abandon the farm when they fi nd out that Mrs. McIntyre plans to fi re Chancey. The second part of the story focuses on the ways that Guizac threatens the black farmworkers. Hoping to turn Mrs. McIntyre against the Pole, the workers reveal Guizac’s plan to bring his cousin to the farm so that she can marry one of the farmhands. Enraged by Guizac’s manipulations, she vows to fi re him, proclaiming, “I am not responsible for the world’s misery.” Later, toward the story’s conclusion, the ironic comment returns to haunt her. In part 3 Mr. Shortley returns the farm (his wife has died of a sudden heart attack). Embittered, Shortley badgers Mrs. McIntyre and the townsfolk about Guizac’s demonic presence. The story ends with a violent scene: A large tractor runs over Guizac, who, after receiving last rites from the priest, dies before the others, who crowd around an ambulance. Referred to by McIntyre as the “Displaced Person” or simply “D.P.,” Guizac is a concentration camp survivor, who, with the priest’s and Mrs. McIntyre’s assistance, immigrates to America with his wife and children. Skeptical of the foreigner, Mrs. Shortley calls him “Gobblehook,” even though his presence reminds her of a newsreel of “a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people,” a vision of the Holocaust.

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Despite Mrs. Shortley’s reservations and her visions of others’ suffering, she demonizes the displaced Pole. Yet, he becomes a saintlike figure in Mrs. McIntyre’s eyes. An “expert mechanic, carpenter, and a mason,” Guizac works quickly and efficiently. Unlike Mr. Shortley, Guizac is clean and does not smoke. He is Mrs. McIntyre’s ideal worker, a strong man capable of running the farm and generating the income she craves. Guizac, however, becomes the object of her scorn when she discovers that he is trying to save another displaced person, his cousin, a victim of Nazi Germany’s campaign to eradicate cultural and racial difference. The story concludes with one of O’Connor’s grand moments of realization, the violent death of the “D.P.,” during which Mrs. McIntyre’s eyes “and Mr. Shortley’s eyes and the Negro’s eyes come together in a look that froze them in collusion forever.” By not doing anything, by not speaking or acting, they become complicit partners in Guizac’s death, demonstrating how little the people on the farm understand about humanity and how little they are aware of grace at work in the world. Mrs. McIntyre equates Guizac with Christ: “Christ was just another D.P.” Symbolically, they all participate in Guizac’s crucifi xion, an act that unites them and leads them to see their own displacement, their lack of connection with the divine. In the story’s ultimate reversal Mrs. McIntyre sees herself as lost, another “D.P.”: “Her mind was not taking a hold of all that was happening. She felt she was in some foreign country where the people bent over the body were natives, and she watched like a stranger while the dead man was carried away in the ambulance.” Unable to process this moment of revelation, the farmworkers leave, and Mrs. McIntyre deteriorates. Refusing to understand and respond to suffering, she becomes, with the farm’s peacock, the recipient of the priest’s care. Whether she accepts the vision she has been given and moves toward salvation remains unclear. The short paragraph that ends the story describes Mrs. McIntyre as blind and mute, a displaced person among a world of others, who, as she has, have fallen from grace. While this vision of the world is indeed a dark one, the beautiful peacock

remains, an outward, visible sign of the potential for salvation.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Both Mrs. McIntyre in “The Displaced Person” and Ruby Turpin in O’Connor’s story “Revelation” experience visions. How do these visions compare? Why are their visions significant? 2. The story often describes eyes and their color. Why is this significant? How do seeing and understanding figure into “The Displaced Person”? 3. The peacock, an object of the priest’s affection, is often described in colorful language and figures prominently in the story. Is the peacock symbolic? What does its presence add to the narrative? 4. Compare and contrast Mrs. Shortley in “The Displaced Person” with the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In what ways can both be said to experience an awakening?

“Good Country People” (1955) O’Connor added “Good Country People” to the short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find at the last minute, after she had already negotiated the collection’s contents. The story appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in July 1955, the same month the collection was published by Harcourt, Brace. At the center of the story lies Joy (Hulga) Hopewell, a 32-year-old woman with a heart condition and an artificial leg—her father shot her leg off during a hunting trip when she was 10 years old—who earned a Ph.D. in philosophy and who, inspired by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, changed her name to Hulga. Joy-Hulga reluctantly lives with her mother, a divorcée, on the family farm. After establishing the setting and describing Joy, Mrs. Hopewell, and Mrs. Hopewell’s friend and tenant farmer Mrs. Freeman, the action of the story begins the morning after a 19-year-old Bible salesman with a phallic name, Manley Pointer, has visited the Hopewell home, a farm much like O’Connor’s beloved Andalusia. In a flashback to

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the previous evening, the reader learns that Manley professes to have a heart condition, has dedicated his life to “Chrustian [sic] service,” and he and Joy-Hulga have agreed to go for a picnic the following day. She, viewing the salesman as inferior and impressionable, has dreamed during the night that she will seduce Manley and teach him about philosophy, exposing the weaknesses of what she sees as his fi nite belief system and revealing that God does not exist. Ironically, Manley becomes the seducer, the one who leads Joy-Hulga into a hayloft, convinces her to allow him to remove her artificial leg, shares with her a whiskey flask hidden in a hollowed-out Bible, lays out pornographic playing cards, gives her a box of condoms, leaves her marooned in the hayloft, and comments, “You ain’t so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!” as he makes off with Joy’s glasses and artificial limb. After this stunning climax, the story returns to the banter of Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, who, seeing Manley leave the barn, comment on his dullness and simplicity. The story plays with different possibilities for understanding; the ways that people negotiate the world, interpret others’ actions, and arrive at their own ways of making meaning. It also deals with the manipulative way human beings vie for control and the many games that ensue from the desire to master others and, ultimately, life’s purpose. The chief example of such a tricky figure is Joy Hopewell, who in graduate school changes her name to Hulga: something ugly, unthinkable, the Germanic name that declares her nihilistic enlightenment and philosophical affi nities. Joy-Hulga believes that she has risen above the farm’s banalities and the limitations of the surrounding community’s adherence to a literal interpretation of religious teaching. Whereas her mother and Mrs. Freeman attribute worldly actions to a divine plan, JoyHulga deduces that nothing matters, that life lacks purpose. As with many of her works, O’Connor gives the reader not-so-subtle signs of Joy-Hulga’s fallen nature: her absurd name, her desire to seduce Manley, and her physical affl ictions—a wooden leg (she treats it “as someone else would his soul”) and weak heart, both metaphors for spiritual sickness.

Having failed to escape what she views as the simplistic farm world inhabited by the “good country people” her mother holds in the highest regard, Joy-Hulga stomps around the house disparaging rural life. Here O’Connor depicts the radical confl ict between worldviews of unsophisticated farm people who fail to see beyond outward appearances and those of university-formed intellectuals who, in their exalted pride, dismiss the possibility of grace and blind themselves to the ways of the world. While Joy-Hulga is determined to create her own, differentiated reality, she also is a game player, someone who derives pleasure from toying with the Bible salesman and dreams of pulling apart what she considers to be his crude worldview. Ironically, she becomes trapped in her own game, the victim of a con man. Even though she possesses a great intellect, her mother, Mrs. Freeman, and Manley understand her vulnerability and childlike nature. Although O’Connor lampoons Joy-Hulga in the story, she, unlike the other characters, experiences an epiphany, one in which, in the face of hardship, she confronts her own weakness, blindness, and lost innocence. The story ends with the closest thing to romance O’Connor offers: a foodless picnic in which two manipulators try to outfox each other. As Manley unveils his intelligence, his equally nihilistic worldview, and the licentious tools of his trade, Joy-Hulga gasps, “Aren’t you . . . just good country people?” Here, she reveals the naïveté that she and her mother share. In a typical O’Connor moment of revelation, Joy-Hulga confronts her own blindness and, like many of O’Connor’s protagonists, is shocked into awareness. She, her mother, Mrs. Freeman, and Manley mirror one another in their self-absorbed visions of the world, but the reader is left with Joy-Hulga’s epiphany and her potential for both seeing the fallen nature of the world and accepting grace. As her mother and Mrs. Freeman have, Joy-Hulga has fallen for a clichéd notion of human nature. O’Connor describes Joy-Hulga in “dusty sunlight” as she turns “her churning face toward the opening” and sees Manley moving over the “green speckled lake.” While the language here hints that she has gained a new understanding of the world, O’Connor leaves the

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reader to stitch together the story’s details, imagine what Joy-Hulga now sees, and evaluate the motives behind the characters’ shocking actions. In this fi nal moment the narrator leaves Joy-Hulga and returns to her mother and Mrs. Freeman, who still see Manley as an exemplar of the simple life. “The world,” Mrs. Hopewell says, “would be better off if we were all that simple.” Of course, this vision of the world, one of false appearances and game players, cannot sustain itself. As Mrs. Freeman pulls an “evil-smelling onion shoot” from the earth, she concedes, “Some can’t be that simple. . . . I know I never could.” These fi nal words ring of a truth that Joy-Hulga’s epiphany makes manifest, one in which goodness lies just beyond reach, and the evils of the world rise each day anew.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss the ways that Mrs. Hopewell, Mrs. Freeman, and Joy-Hulga use language. What emphasis do they place on words; what significance does this emphasis have? 2. On one level, this story, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, is a romance that deals with seduction, sin, and redemption. Compare and contrast O’Connor’s story and Hawthorne’s novel. Why is it significant that both focus on similar subjects?

“Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1961) Set during the beginning of the Civil Rights movement when the South was still segregated, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” fi rst appeared in the October 1961 issue of New World Writing. The story won the fi rst-place prize in the 1962 O. Henry Memorial Award competition. Significantly, O’Connor’s story includes what is commonly referred to as an O. Henry twist, a literary term derived from O. Henry’s stories, which usually include an unexpected conclusion or climax. These surprise endings often cause the audience to review the story from a different perspective by revealing new information about the characters or plot. Upon

a second reading, the reader can detect the many clues and foreshadowing devices that lead to the story’s unexpected climax. On a fi rst reading, however, as with many works of literature, the story’s many ironies may not be noticed. Of course, as with most literature, the reader should view the fi rst reading as a primary investigation that will require further readings and analysis to plumb the story’s depth. The plot of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is easily summarized: A mother who does not wish to ride the bus alone insists that her son, Julian, accompany her to a weight-reducing class at the downtown YWCA. The story begins on the bus; focuses on significant exchanges among Julian, his mother, and the other bus riders, including an African-American woman traveling with her young son; and concludes with the bus’s arrival and the death of Julian’s mother on a downtown sidewalk. O’Connor’s story is told from a limited thirdperson narrative point of view, in which the narrator focuses on the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of a single character, in this case, Julian. Because the reader encounters events through Julian’s eyes, the reader may resist judging Julian, or at least withhold judgment until the end of the story, when Julian’s many contradictions come to light. Were one to read “Everything That Rises” considering the narrator’s ironic position—the subtle way the story’s tone and words convey Julian’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions—then the story becomes a comic exploration of human flaws. While tragedy takes as its subject human suffering, comedy tends to showcase human foibles. Thus, even though the reader may ultimately experience Julian and his mother’s blindness—their self-possession, resistance to change, and disdain for those with whom they interact—the narrator presents their flaws from a comic perspective, one that acknowledges human weakness. In that sense, the story contains dramatic irony, in which the reader ultimately understands the characters’ faults, and a cosmic vision of convergence, one O’Connor derives from the writings of the French Roman Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The story’s title is taken from Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, a mystical work in which he argues that, despite frailty, blindness, weakness, and a tendency

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to see their selves and not others, human beings are being drawn to a point of convergence, an “Omega Point,” a form of human evolution resulting in selfawareness and ultimately a form of supreme consciousness (for more information on this idea, see question number 2). Such an understanding of the story does not present itself after one isolated read. Rather, it is important to read “Everything That Rises Must Converge” in light of the other stories in the collection of the same name, which was published after O’Connor’s death, and consider O’Connor’s comments on the collection’s title, its source (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), and the reviews O’Connor wrote about Teilhard de Chardin’s works. In her review of The Phenomenon of Man in the fall 1961 issue of the American Scholar, O’Connor writes that Teilhard de Chardin offers “a scientific expression of what the poet attempts to do: penetrate matter until spirit is revealed in it” (“Outstanding Books, 1931–1961,” American Scholar 618). Part of the way that O’Connor “penetrates matter” lies in her use of irony. The title of the story, for example, although drawn from Teilhard de Chardin, also alludes to the “rising” of the mother’s blood pressure, which ultimately leads to her death. Although Julian presents himself as an independent intellectual, a close examination of the story’s language and descriptions reveals that he is actually dependent on his mother’s continued fi nancial and emotional support. She has made significant sacrifices to pay for Julian’s education, so many that the purchase of a $7.50 hat causes her to worry. Julian tries to convince his mother that the purchase is justified, not considering the economic pressure she feels, which Julian exacerbates by continuing to rely on her. Julian views the trip to the Y as a personal sacrifice and sees himself as a martyr, yet the narrator also reveals Julian’s self-doubts and his acknowledgment of his mother’s sacrifices. At the beginning of the story, the parent-child relationship seems to be reversed. By the end of the story, however, it is clear that Julian, though an adult with a college education, is still very much a child, one dependent on his mother’s money, care, and guidance. Despite having earned a college degree, Julian remains set apart,

incapable of acting or supporting himself, lost in his interior world. Although he states, “True culture is in the mind,” Julian is an idealist out of touch with reality, a man of modest intellectual means trapped in a limited worldview. Furthermore, although Julian purports to have progressive views on race relations and social issues, claiming that his mother lives “according to the laws of her own fantasy world, outside of which she never sets foot,” Julian fantasizes about hurting his mother by taking home a black friend or biracial girlfriend. He also dreams about conversing with educated African Americans with whom he can share his world of ideas. As further irony, for all his so-called liberal views on race relations, Julian longs for the aristocratic past he has been denied, one afforded by the exploitation of African Americans. His dreams, however, never actualize; he remains a man of conflicted thoughts incapable of performing noble deeds. If one considers the literary term theme in its broadest sense—any significant, recurring, or developed concept or argument in a work of literature—then several interrelated themes emerge in the story: the fallen nature of the modern world; the struggle for social class and status; morals, morality, and moral responsibility; racism in the South; the impact of integration in the South; intellectualism and elitism; knowledge and ignorance; self-deception versus self-understanding; the manipulation of others; thinking versus acting; the ideal verses the real; appearance versus reality. These are a few of the many possible subjects to explore in writing about and discussing the story. As with O’Connor’s very best works, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” contains grotesque characters who wrestle with meaning, sacredness, and understanding. This particular story also highlights the longing for love that is a part of universal humanity. In writing about the struggle between races, a region divided between the old and new, and a mother and son who even in their seeming differences care for each other, O’Connor presents seekers in the modern world, those confronting the bitter taste of enmity and the reality of change in spite of their blindness, their pride-fi lled distortion of what it means to be alive. As James

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Joyce’s “Araby” does, O’Connor’s tale ends in a “tide of darkness,” the “world of guilt and sorrow” that both Julian and the reader encounter. To perceive this world is to perceive contradiction—the intersection of past and present, secular and sacred, self and other, hate and love, the convergence of paradoxes that form the American experience.

For Discussion or Writing 1. One of the issues teachers and students alike wrestle with is characterization—the way in which an author’s characters represent things in the real world. With this in mind, assess the African-American characters in the story. What ideas, characteristics, or qualities do they embody? How do these characters compare or contrast with O’Connor’s white characters? To explore this subject further, read other O’Connor stories that contain, describe, or quote black characters, such as “Greenleaf,” “Revelation,” and “The Enduring Chill.” With O’Connor’s descriptions in mind, evaluate her representation of African Americans. Explain your assessment with details from the stories. Test your hypothesis by asking the typical questions used to evaluate literary characters: Are the characters full and round, or are they simple and flat? Do the characters change? If so, how? If not, why is that important? 2. O’Connor derives the story’s title from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Roman Catholic priest, mystic, and paleontologist, whose works O’Connor read and reviewed in 1960 and 1961. For Teilhard de Chardin, no human being is fi xed. Instead, all human beings evolve toward a point of transcendence—universal love—a point where the outside world and the inside world converge in Christ. Yet O’Connor’s protagonists in “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and in the posthumously published short story collection of the same name do not reach the “Omega Point.” Why is this significant? Why would O’Connor use such a positive, life-affi rming title for a collection of stories that has so many failed characters? In addition to the title story, read other stories from the collection, perhaps “Greenleaf,” “A View from the Woods,”

“The Lame Shall Enter First,” “Revelation,” and “Judgment Day.” Think about the protagonists’ struggles and moments of awareness. With those in mind, evaluate how O’Connor incorporates Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of humanity. 3. “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is set at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. Choose a reliable information source such as an online or print encyclopedia and learn more about the movement. Then, discuss how knowing about civil rights helps readers understand the story’s confl ict.

“Revelation” (1964) “Revelation” was published in the 1964 spring issue of the Sewanee Review; it was the last story to appear separately before O’Connor’s death that summer. Many critics consider it her finest work. At the center of the story is Ruby Turpin, a 180pound middle-class white woman who is obsessed with class-consciousness and racial relations. The story takes place in two locations: a doctor’s office, where Ruby and her husband have gone to have a cow-kick-induced ulcer on his leg treated, and at the Turpin farm, where the story’s climactic scene occurs at the Turpins’ “pig parlor,” a pen raised on a slab of concrete the Turpins hose down every evening. In many ways the story is the culmination of O’Connor’s writing career and spiritual vision, with the fi nal scene containing the most comprehensive epiphany in all of her works: a vision of “a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling towards heaven.” As with many of her works, especially those in the posthumously published collection Everything That Rises Must Converge, the central character, Mrs. Turpin, witnesses a moment of “convergence” as it might be described by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Roman Catholic priest, mystic, and paleontologist whose works O’Connor read and reviewed in 1960 and 1961. She called Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man “a scientific expression of what the poet attempts to do: penetrate matter until spirit is

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revealed in it” (“Outstanding Books, 1931–1961,” American Scholar 618). O’Connor was drawn to Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “Omega Point,” a scientific explanation of human evolution, a movement toward self-awareness that would ultimately lead to a form of supreme consciousness. For Teilhard de Chardin, no human being is fixed. Instead, all human beings evolve toward a point of transcendence—universal love—a point where the outside world and the inside world converge in Christ. Ruby Turpin reaches this grand epiphany after a series of disillusionments, the most significant of which occurs in the doctor’s office when a homely acne-covered girl aptly named “Mary Grace” assaults Turpin with a book—entitled Human Development—and then wrestles her to the floor. Before the girl can be sedated, Mrs. Turpin insists that the girl has something to say to her, that she knows her and can see through her. In reply Mary Grace exclaims, “Go back to hell where you come from, you old wart hog!” As O’Connor readers come to expect, this moment is suffused with comedy and pathos. It is the sort of violent scene usually accompanying sudden moments of awareness in O’Connor’s works. Prior to this violent encounter, Ruby Turpin has been sizing up the members of the waiting room, judging their social status according to their clothes, shoes, and sense of propriety. Mrs. Turpin is haunted by the social pecking order; her thoughts often veer from the waiting room to the materialist and racial hierarchy with which she classifies human beings. She literally holds simultaneous conversations inside her head and aloud in the waiting room, at times conversing with those waiting for the doctor, at other times responding to her own thoughts with verbal utterances and even emphatic praises of thanks to Jesus, who has created her with a little bit of everything and spared her the shame of being an underprivileged white person or a person of color. After she spends the afternoon in bed with an ice pack over her left eye, a sign of renewed vision, Turpin makes her way to the pig parlor, where she questions God. Believing that the encounter with Mary Grace is the result of divine providence, Turpin asks, “What do you send me a message

like that for. . . . How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Finally, after mulling over about her social status and religious standing, Turpin demands, “Who do you think you are?” an impassioned cry that has been building in her since her confrontation in the doctor’s office. In a moment that mirrors the epiphany the grandmother has in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Mrs. Turpin is struck speechless. She then experiences an unfolding of mystery as “a visionary light settled in her eyes.” She sees the various stratified members of southern society “rumbling toward heaven.” As her vision ends, she hears “the voices of souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.” It is the most complete moment of awareness in all of O’Connor’s works, one that embodies the inclusive vision of grace O’Connor held throughout her life. In the end Ruby Turpin may form O’Connor’s strongest social commentary. Turpin embodies a bigoted southern culture consumed by notions of race and class, a culture O’Connor often represents and comments upon in her stories. Among those who represent the stratified ranks of southern society, Mrs. Turpin confronts her self-image, one over which she stews during waking and sleeping hours. In a recurrent nightmare reminiscent of the exportation of Jews during the Holocaust, Mrs. Turpin sees “all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head,” dreaming “they were all crammed together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.” This vision not only haunts Mrs. Turpin, also it forms the vision of humanity given by O’Connor in her other works, one in which violence provokes in both her characters and her readers dramatic epiphanies, moments of awareness in which the blind indeed do learn to see—the stuff of which biblical revelations are made.

For Discussion or Writing 1. On one level, “Revelation” deals with social and religious hypocrisy. With this in mind, read other O’Connor works treating a similar theme, such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Displaced Person,” “Greenleaf,” “Everything

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That Rises Must Converge,” “The Partridge Festival,” and Wise Blood. What connections can be made? Why is this theme so important to O’Connor? What significance does this theme have in understanding her body of works? 2. Discuss Mrs. Turpin’s vision of heaven. Is it possible that this vision is a commentary on stereotypical visions of the afterlife afforded by mainstream Christianity? Why or why not?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON O’CONNOR AND HER WORK 1. Much has been written about the “grotesque” or “gothic” style of southern fiction, especially the works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. Grotesque is a term applied to a decorative style in sculpture, painting, and architecture characterized by fantastic representations—art forms creating distortions of the natural to the point of comic absurdity, ridiculous ugliness, or ludicrous caricature. With this defi nition in mind, first consider how O’Connor’s stories rely on grotesque style elements and why these style elements are significant. To extend your examination of the subject, contrast O’Connor’s story with a work of Faulkner’s, such as As I Lay Dying, “A Rose for Emily,” or “That Evening Sun.” What similarities and differences can you find? Why do both authors write with a grotesque style? How does this style relate to their stories’ content, form, and any meaning we can draw from them? 2. In several of her stories O’Connor creates intellectuals or would-be artists who are dependent on mothers whose ways of seeing the world they despise. Caught in a world they abhor, these intellectuals often experience conflict and see themselves as victims. Read “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “Good Country People,” “The Enduring Chill,” and “The Partridge Festival.” Pay attention to the way O’Connor presents the protagonists in these stories. What connections can you make? Why is it significant that O’Connor depicts these figures ironically? Why use an intelligent character as a subject to be cri-

tiqued? What realizations do these protagonists attain, and why are these epiphanies significant— what do they say about O’Connor’s failed protagonists and the world they inhabit? 3. Compare and contrast the grandmother of the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and Julian’s mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” What do the two have in common? How do they both feel about and cope with a changing world? 4. According to Roman Catholic theological tradition, sin is a weakness, a blindness, a tendency to see one and not others. Discuss the O’Connor characters who are sinners and the significance of the sins they commit. 5. O’Connor’s stories are fi lled with symbols, a term literary critics and commentators commonly employ to designate objects or processes that not only serve as images of themselves but also refer to a concept or abstract idea that is important to a work’s theme(s). Often, O’Connor uses names that symbolize abstract ideas and indicate important themes in her works. With that in mind, examine O’Connor’s many metaphorical names, such as Tom T. Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and Mary Grace in “Revelation.” What do these names signify? How do they enrich her works? How do they encourage readers to think about and interpret her stories? WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Balee, Susan. Flannery O’Connor: Literary Prophet of the South. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. Baumgaertner, Jill P. Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring. Wheaton, Ill.: H. Shaw, 1988. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Flannery O’Connor. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Browning, Preston M. Flannery O’Connor. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

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Caron, Timothy Paul. Struggles over the Word: Race and Religion in O’Connor, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000. Cash, Jean W. Flannery O’Connor: A Life. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. Clark, Beverly L., and Melvin J. Friedman, eds. Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Coles, Robert. Flannery O’Connor’s South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Eggenschwiler, David. The Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1972. Enjolras, Laurence. Flannery O’Connor’s Characters. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998. Farmer, David R. Flannery O’Connor: A Descriptive Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1981. Feeley, Kathleen. Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972. The Flannery O’Connor–Andalusia Foundation. Available online. URL: http://www.andalusiafarm. org/. Accessed March 24, 2009. “Flannery O’Connor Collection.” Georgia College and State University. Available online. URL: http://library.gcsu.edu/~sc/foc.html. Accessed April 2, 2006. Friedman, Melvin J., and Lewis A. Lawson, eds. The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Fordham University Press, 1966. Gentry, Marshall B. Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Giannone, Richard. Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Gordon, Sarah. Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000 Grimshaw, James A. The Flannery O’Connor Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Johansen, Ruthann K. The Narrative Secret of Flannery O’Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Logsdon, Loren, and Charles W. Mayer, eds. Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1987. Martin, Carter W. The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969. McFarland, Dorothy T. Flannery O’Connor. New York: F. Ungar, 1976. McKenzie, Barbara. Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Muller, Gilbert H. Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Grotesque. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972. O’Connor, Flannery. Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988. Orvell, Miles. Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Paulson, Suzanne M. Flannery O’Connor: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Ragen, Brian A. A Wreck on the Road to Damascus: Innocence, Guilt, and Conversion in Flannery O’Connor. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1989. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century: 1945 to the Present—Flannery O’Connor.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/ chap10/oconnor.html. Accessed May 5, 2005. Scott, R. Neil. Flannery O’Connor: An Annotated Reference Guide to Criticism. Milledgeville, Ga.: Timberlane Books, 2002. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Walters, Dorothy. Flannery O’Connor. New York: Twayne, 1973. Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Blake G. Hobby

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am. (The Bell Jar)

B

y the time she took her own life on February 11, 1963, the poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist Sylvia Plath was known in England (for the most part, Americans had not heard of Plath until her death) as an exceptionally gifted writer and champion of the feminine cause. Her poetry, fiction, and prose had earned her a reputation as a skillful artist capable of honing her craft, and she was especially seen as a gifted young poet of great potential. Yet, her personal life had become a nightmare, one that both inspired her to create poems with amazing alacrity and had taken her to utter despair. Unlike the American myth of success in which people ascend into greatness, knowing health and wealth and fame, Sylvia’s is a tragic story imbued with mythology, the tale of an inimitable artist who suffered greatly. Although her life was fi lled with accomplishments, her works, especially her late and best-known works such as “Ariel,” “Daddy,” and “Lady Lazarus,” are most often viewed from the perspective of her death. In fact, much Plath criticism deals with the impact of her mental illness on her work and on the relationship between her life and her works. Critics are now reassessing her work from perspectives not tied to her psychological disposition and suicide. What remains clear is that Plath’s works deal with transformation, the power to confront pain, to reimagine the unimaginable, to create art out of experience, and to enter life again.

Born in Boston on October 27, 1932, Sylvia Plath was the first child of Otto Emil Plath, a Germanborn immigrant, bee expert, and Boston University professor, and Aurelia Schober Plath, a teacher 21 years younger than her husband (the two met when Aurelia registered to take a German course Otto was teaching; Otto was married although estranged from his wife at the time). Two and a half years later, after the birth of her brother, Warren, the family moved to Aurelia’s hometown, Winthrop Bay, Massachusetts, just east of Boston, where the young Sylvia’s imagination was fed by the sounds, beauty, and power of the sea, the inspiration for many of the rhythms and images found in her poems. After developing gangrene, having his leg amputated, contracting pneumonia, and suffering an embolism, the result of undiagnosed diabetes, Otto Plath died in 1940, leaving his wife with two young children and little money. Otto’s death haunted Sylvia, who at the impressionable age of eight watched as someone she loved died after a long, painful illness. Before his illness, her father had been a strong man, one whose scholarly endeavors determined how the house and family schedule were structured. Thus, Sylvia felt his absence intensely and remarked to her mother that she would never speak to God again after her father’s death. Two years later Aurelia moved with her children and her parents to Wellesley, Massachusetts, to teach medical secretarial courses. Although her mother did her best to provide her children with

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the finest education possible, Sylvia’s early years were marked by insecurities about money and social status, an anxious sense of self-doubt she masked as both a child and adult but that had a profound influence on both her writing and personality. Writing voraciously in journals at a young age, a practice she continued throughout her life, Sylvia led a productive life, impressing many with her talent as both an artist and a writer. By the time she graduated from high school, Sylvia had published poems in newspapers and written more than 50 stories, one of which, “Summer Will Not Come Again,” appeared in Seventeen magazine (August 1950). The recipient of the Olive Higgins Prouty Fund scholarship, Plath attended Smith College, a competitive school with a long reputation of academic excellence. Although she felt enormous pressure and lived with a plaguing sense of self-doubt, Sylvia performed well, distinguishing herself socially and academically, writing for the school newspaper and journal, and serving in various leadership positions, including editor of the Smith Review, correspondent to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and a guest editorship at Mademoiselle, for which she interviewed famous writers, including Elizabeth Bowen, R ICHARD WILBUR, and George Steiner. After three hard years of pushing herself, Plath suffered a mental breakdown, for which she underwent hospitalization, psychiatric treatment, and electric shock therapy, all paid for by her Smith sponsor, Olive Higgins Prouty. By all accounts the treatment was successful; Plath returned to Smith in the winter of 1953–54 and graduated on June 6, 1955, summa cum laude. After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship, Plath attended Newnham College in Cambridge, England, one of two women’s colleges dating from the Victorian period. In Cambridge she met Edward James Hughes (a gifted, rising poet known as “Ted Hughes”); they were married in London in June 1956. In 1957 the couple returned to the United States and lived in Northampton, where Plath taught at Smith for a year. Despite her success and popularity, Plath felt inadequate as a teacher, overwhelmed by the demands of teaching and unable to dedicate the time she needed to writing. The couple then stayed in Boston for a year. In spring 1959 Plath attended

Yaddo, a writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Next, the couple made a cross-country camping trip before returning to England. When they arrived, Plath was two months pregnant. Their first child, Frieda Rebecca, was born at home with the help of a midwife in London on April 1, 1960. Sylvia’s first book, The Colossus and Other Poems, whose title poem dealt with her relationship with her father, was published in England in October 1960 and in the United States in 1962. The poems in Colossus date from the 1950s, including her time at Yaddo, when her style began to change dramatically. From 1956 Plath sought a publisher for the poems, all the while editing, reworking, and altering them, as well as adding new ones. Some critics, viewing Colossus in light of her late poems, often see Plath’s first published collection as belonging to a period of apprenticeship, one in which she often wrote poems as exercises, composing deliberately; experimenting with meter, sound, and rhyme; and working, at least according to Hughes, “very slowly with an open Thesaurus on her knee” (Orr 170). Yet, as Pamela Smith, in “Architectonics: Sylvia Plath’s Colossus,” argues, “The Colossus emerges as something more significant than a poet’s workbook, more than some literary equivalent of the Hanon exercises of piano” (Butscher, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work 113). Similarly, Linda Wagner-Martin, in Sylvia Plath: A Biography, argues: Ted Hughes and others—Plath’s college roommates among them—have given us the familiar image of Sylvia writing poems, sitting with the heavy, red-covered thesaurus that was her father’s open on her lap, consulting it frequently. But as early as 1956, even before she had met Hughes, Sylvia had begun trying to write poems that spoke more colloquially. She had come to think of the poet as song-maker, not as scholar with her head buried in books. (166)

Thus, the late Colossus poems shift in diction, rhythm, and sound, defying previous conventions. By the close of the decade Plath’s poetry was informed by oral conventions and relying on comparatively low diction: This immediate language without the

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poetic distance of her previous work cannot be classified as “apprenticeship” work or mere exercises. In fact, by the March 18, 1961, composition of “Tulips,” Plath’s method had radically changed. She now wrote quickly, urgently, transforming the act of composition into an ecstatic experience, entering the personae she created and infusing them with an intensity not known previously. As Steven Gold Axelrod in “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath” describes, most of the Colossus poems are from what he calls a “second stage” of her development, “a period of growth and experiment” (Gill 76). As Axelrod further notes, this poetry “has not received the attention it deserves.” Crossing the Water, published posthumously in 1971, also contains poems written around the time that Colossus was published. Jo Gill, in “The Colossus and Crossing the Water,” maintains that, rather than the work of an apprentice, the poems in both collections contain “multiple voices, personae and perspectives at play . . . sometimes contradictory, often indeterminate,” poems that “merit attention: their allusiveness and elusiveness, their variety and range, their complexity and above all their sophisticated self-reflexivity” (Gill 104). On February 6, 1961, Plath had a miscarriage, an experience she chronicled in “Parliament Hill Fields” (February 11, 1961), in which the poem’s speaker, walking alone, mourns her loss: “Your absence is inconspicuous; / Nobody can tell what I lack.” Later that month she underwent an appendectomy, which provided the inspiration for “Tulips” and “In Plaster.” During 1961 she wrote The Bell Jar about her experiences from 1953 (the novel was published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas one month before her death): the guest editorship at a woman’s magazine, the bout with depression, and the failed suicide attempt. As early as June 13, 1959, Plath wrote in her journal: “Read COSMOPOLITAN from cover to cover. Two mental-health articles. I must write one about a college girl suicide. THE DAY I DIED. And a story, a novel even” (Unabridged Journals 495). Thus, she had been thinking about the novel and about revisiting the time of her breakdown for several years. In the same year Plath and Hughes traveled southwest of London to Devon, where, enthralled with a thatch-roofed

house that had been a former rectory, they decided to relocate to “Court Greene”—a manor home with nine rooms, horse stables, a tennis court, three acres of land, and an apple orchard. Although Plath and Hughes had to spend a great deal of time fi xing up the house, Court Greene afforded them both with an ideal writing environment, Plath enjoying a secondfloor study with a view of the front lawn, a wall separating the property from the adjacent church, and two trees that appear in her poetry: a yew tree and a giant wych elm. On January 17, 1962, Plath gave birth to a son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes. She was becoming known in London literary circles as a poet; in June 1962 she recorded some of her poems and provided commentary on them for the BBC Living Poet series. She wrote The Women, a radio play for the BBC. During this frantic year, Ted had an extramarital affair, the couple separated, Ted moved out of the Devon house, and Sylvia and the children moved to London to a house once occupied by William Butler Yeats. In the five months preceding her death on February 11, 1963, Plath wrote most of the poems collected posthumously as Ariel, at times as many as two or three a day. According to Hughes, Plath had selected and ordered the Ariel poems in a binder so that the collection opened with the word love, which opens the poem “Morning Song,” and concluded with the word spring, the fi nal word of the poem “Wintering.” Omitting 12 poems that dealt with what Hughes felt were inappropriate, hurtful, and overly personal subjects—many dealing with Plath’s anger over his extramarital affair—Hughes edited the fi rst edition of Ariel, which appeared on March 11, 1965. So many copies were sold that the collection immediately needed to be reprinted. It was not until 1981 that Hughes, in the notes section of Plath’s Collected Poems, revealed that his ordering of the Ariel poems differed from Plath’s intentions. The reader learns this from a simple statement Hughes makes in the introduction, which refers to page 295 of the text on which Plath’s intended ordering appears. In the introduction Hughes downplayed the heavy-handed editing he did: “The Ariel eventually published in 1965 was a somewhat different volume from the

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one she planned. . . . It omitted some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962.” Critics have taken Hughes to task for this decision; many feminist readings of Plath’s poems were inspired by Hughes’s omissions and admissions. The Ariel poems attest to the growing sense of isolation and desperation Plath felt. Violent, direct, and often fi xated with self-annihilation, these poems are shockingly truthful, as in “A Birthday Present”: “And the knife not carve, but enter / Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, / And the universe slide from my side” and in the famous line from “Lady Lazarus”: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well” and in the images of mutilation that occur in “Daddy,” the speaker confesses: “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know,” lines that, although they are from a persona Plath has created, nevertheless have poignant autobiographical correspondences and speak of a liberation that will only occur through murderous violence. As the executor of Plath’s estate, Hughes has overseen not only her personal effects but also the publication of her prose, fiction, letters, journals, and poetry, the body of work that we know. Hughes’s role has been questioned because no one is sure whether Plath had fi led for divorce before her death. Had she petitioned for divorce, Hughes’s inheritance would have been disputed. In letters to her mother and Richard Murphy, Plath writes that she is applying for a divorce. However, Hughes has maintained that the separation was not permanent and that the couple continued to talk about a future together. In 1982, when Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems appeared in print, Plath received a Pulitzer Prize, the fourth author at the time to have been awarded the prize posthumously (Amy Lowell, Stephen Vincent Benét, and William Carlos Williams died before their awards were given in 1926, 1944, and 1963, respectively). Plath began keeping a diary at the age of 11 and kept journals until her suicide in February 1963. In the journals, Hughes has also faced criticism for his role in handling them: Plath’s last journal, which contains entries from winter 1962 up to her death,

was destroyed by Hughes. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshman year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1980 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough. In 1982, when Smith College acquired all of Plath’s remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, marking the 50th anniversary of her death. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals and left the project to Freida and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. After Kukil finished her edits in December 1999, Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath in 2000. Hughes was poet laureate of England from 1984 until his death on October 28, 1998. In 1998 he published Birthday Letters, a collection of poems he had written over the years reflecting on his courtship, marriage, and life with Plath and of his life after her death. A number of the Birthday Letters poems were published previously in Hughes’s New Selected Poems, 1957–1994. These works remain contentious; many critics question Hughes’s intent and find the collection troubling. Nevertheless, this collection along with The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) and Ariel: The Restored Edition—A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (2004) with a foreword by Frieda Hughes have created new interest in Plath’s works, which continue to be read and studied by the general public and academicians alike.

“Morning Song” (1961) The first poem Plath selected for Ariel, “Morning Song,” opens with the word love, a deliberate choice for a poem about birth, motherhood, and love, and a symbolic choice for the collection as a whole, which begins with “Morning Song” and ends with “Wintering,” a poem anticipating the new birth of spring yet wondering whether nature will survive. Unexpectedly, ringing like a lost voice of youth, the writer who portrayed birth in The Bell Jar as a cataclysmic event threatening to sever the self from its foundations and a process often controlled by men, turns away from the confi ning and pain-filled aspects of childbirth in “Morning Song” and pens a

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work filled with nurturing images and promises of growth. In six tercets, the speaker focuses on sounds: a baby’s first cry, the elated voices of a midwife and a mother who greet the newborn, a distant sea, and the “clear vowels” of the infant that rouse its mother and “rise like balloons.” Here it is difficult not to collapse the poem’s speaker with Plath, who, in this poem, appears as a lactating mother, stumbling from bed “cow-heavy” and wondering at the miracle of life. Unlike so many of Plath’s poems, “Morning Song” is an intimate work devoid of irony, angst, and struggle. In short, it is a hymn to life with all of its possibilities. Yet, as in so much of Plath’s writing, here the speaker stands apart, a “statue” in a “drafty museum,” an observer dissociated from her own child, a listener trying to understand, a woman clothed in a “Victorian nightgown” separated from the naked purity of her child but basking in its beauty and aware of its needs. Throughout the poem “the elements” provide a sense of cosmic wonder, as the baby’s voice and the wind create a scene that is also contained in a small “window square” filling with snow. The speaker depicts a world in microcosm, one where the simplicity and infinite creativity of a child mask, at least temporarily, the world’s weariness. In this still moment a child’s cry and prelinguistic utterances inspire the artist, leaving her to contemplate the coming of the new day and the potential for rebirth the morning will bring. Capturing a reverential moment, “Morning Song” is a poignant recollection, one that reveals Plath in a moment of fulfillment. Yet, whether it is because we know of Plath’s death, her many other tortured images, the impending failure of her relationship with Ted Hughes, or the bleak London midwinter that enclosed her final days, the poem’s sense of hope appears transient, ephemeral, a shortlived respite from lived experience; a wish fulfillment of what the artist either could have been or may be.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read other Plath poems that deal with the love of a mother for her children, “By Candlelight,” “Child,” and “Balloons,” noting the persona of the speaker. Who is speaking? How does this persona express itself? According to Susan Basnett,

“The poems to children have a directness about them that brings the reader in straight away to share the beauty of the picture. In these poems there seems to be no I-persona, no intermediary fictionalized figure that intervenes between the I-that-is-writer and the I-that-is-narrator within the poem. The mother who writes so powerfully about her children is also the speaker and the poems are like love letters to those children, messages without ambiguity” (95). Do you agree with Basnett’s assessment of these poems? If so, what message does Plath provide? If not, what ambiguities exist, and what is their significance? 2. Compare “The Manor Garden,” an early mother monologue poem, with later mother poems such as “Morning Song,” “You’re,” and “Balloons.” How does “The Manor Garden” anticipate the later poems; how do the later poems relate to “The Manor Garden”? After analyzing and comparing these poems, write a well-developed essay on the role of the speaker in Plath’s motherhood poems. 3. Compare “Morning Song” with “Barren Woman,” a poem Plath wrote the same week. Are the two poems complementary, or do they define polar opposites? Importantly, why does Plath rely upon the image of a museum in each poem? What connections can be made, and why are these connections significant?

“Blackberrying” (1961) First published in the posthumous collection Crossing the Water (1971), “Blackberrying” is from what critics call Plath’s “transitional period,” the time between Colossus and the Ariel poems when Plath and Hughes had returned to England and after the birth of their daughter. During this period Plath wrote several landscape poems, including “Stars over the Dordogne,” “Blackberrying,” and “Finisterre.” With its triple negations, “Blackberrying” opens in a dark alleyway, a void where the blackberries themselves, “Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes,” “squander their juices” on the speaker’s fingers, creating a sacramental bond, an

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unasked-for “blood sisterhood” the speaker assumes is an indication of the love the berries feel for her. Ironically, the fi rst stanza depicts an inhuman world, yet the speaker personifies the blackberries staining her hands, which she collects in a milk bottle. As the speaker stands before this haunting scene, at the end of the alleyway, undulating sea, to which the speaker is mysteriously drawn, awaits. The speaker does not describe the ocean, however, because she cannot see it. Thus, the speaker implies that the sea’s heaving can only be heard. The second stanza shifts from the view of the path to the sky, where choughs, crowlike birds, fi ll the space with their cries and spin in the wind. Their voices protest, although the speaker is not clear about the object of their objections. Such ominous images reflect the speaker’s interior world, a dark, paranoid space into which she is increasingly drawn, or “hooked,” as the speaker describes at the end of stanza 2. As this stanza reveals, the speaker doubts that she will ever reach the sea, perhaps because she is increasingly caught up in the blackberries, especially one bush covered in fl ies that are stunned, as the speaker is, at the berries’ alluring sweetness, an allure that inspires belief in the unseen, whether it be heaven, as in line 8, or the sea that appears as “a great space / Of white and pewter lights” ringing like a silversmith beating metal at the end of the fi nal stanza. In the fi nal lines of the poem the speaker again peers out into a great nothingness, this time the sea upon which she comes after climbing a steep path with wind “Slapping its phantom laundry” at her. Such an awe-inspiring scene is reminiscent of a romantic vision of the sublime. Yet, while romantic poets might envision a connection with the divine in such an awesome scene created by the inimitable powers of the natural world, here the speaker stands alone before another void, this one stretching endlessly out before her. Whether this exterior journey mirrors an interior journey that the speaker, and by analogy Plath, is making, the fi nal image, bleak, astounding—a scene of great beauty, unbelievable horror, and overwhelming despair—may represent a vision of the fi nal frontier: the realm of death into which we are all ultimately drawn.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “Blackberrying” and “Finisterre,” another of Plath’s poems written in September 1961, are both set on the coast and can be compared with Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West,” which also examines the natural world and comments on the nature of poetic perception, the facility that vies for presence in a world of absence, creating order out of chaos. While for the romantic poets the imagination was the poet’s link with the divine, for Stevens the imagination is the tool we use to create fulfillment in our lives, the sort of order that is both necessary for our survival and a creative power that gives our seemingly purposeless lives meaning. On this level, all three poems may be said to deal with the role of art in our lives. With that in mind, analyze the Plath poems as responses to Stevens, keeping the following questions in mind: What is the relationship between the imagination and reality in art? What does art do for or to its perceiver? Where does art originate? 2. Both Plath’s “Blackberrying” and Galway Kinnell’s “Blackberry Eating” are self-reflexive poems, poems that reflect on the art of poetry and comment on the nature of language. First, compare the two poems and their focus on language/ poetry/the imagination. Then write a well-developed essay that analyzes how the Kinnell poem both relates to and comments upon the Plath poem. 3. Compare “Blackberrying” with earlier Plath landscape poems such as “Point Shirley” and “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows.” What vision of Plath and the world do these poems depict? What notions of the self do the poems present? With your observations in mind, write a well-developed essay that persuades the reader of the significance of Plath’s landscape poems. 4. “The Moon and the Yew Tree” also deals with both the natural world and what may lie beyond. Focusing on both poems’ supernatural and religious imagery, write a well-developed essay on the relationship between religion and the natural world in Plath’s poetry.

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“For a Fatherless Son” (1962) On September 26, 1962, with the composition of “For a Fatherless Son,” Plath began furiously composing poetry over a six-week period, at the end of which she had written 30 poems. “For a Fatherless Son,” as Tim Kendall describes, “introduces a period of intense creativity, during which most of the work later collected in Ariel was written. Plath’s treatment of the theme of adultery in these poems modulates into an elaborate power struggle between betrayer and betrayed, and challenges the rigidity of these categories” (105). The poem opens with a direct, second-person address in which the speaker, with far-reaching similes, prepares a young boy for the absence of his father, who is portrayed as a “death tree” struck by lightning, denuded of its color and life (line 3). The tree stands as an illusion against the sky, which appears as a pig’s rear end. Here, in the first stanza, the speaker prophesies that the young boy, although currently naive and innocent, will know absence, which will increase throughout his life. Significantly, the first line of the poem ends with a paradox (“absence, presently”), which sets up another paradox at the end of the stanza (“lack of attention”). The second stanza, grotesquely comic in nature, describes the boy as “dumb” and “blind” and his face as a mirror, another of Plath’s many reflective images. As the speaker peers at her son, she sees only herself, a sight that seems to be painful for her yet comic to him. For the present the son’s amusement benefits the speaker. But, as she reveals in the third stanza, the speaker knows that one day, beyond the time of grabbing noses, as children often do, her son will know loss and will feel the pain and anger she knows, the sense of betrayal that has set her adrift in the world, stripped of her illusions and hopes. This disillusionment and abandonment are tempered in the penultimate line of the poem, focused on the child’s smile, which sustains her as would an unexpected gift or “found money.” Thus, “For a Fatherless Son” is a poem of paradoxes juxtaposing childlike wonder with an adult’s bitter disillusionment and foretelling the future pain that will be a part of the child’s growth: the necessary recognition of loss, whether it

be a father, as with Ted Hughes, or of a mother, as with Plath, who, estranged from the world and abandoned, will take her own life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. It is possible to read “For a Fatherless Son” from a biographical perspective, noting how the poem comments on the collapse of Plath’s marriage. Read other Plath poems that can be read from a similar perspective—“Word heard, by accident, over the phone,” “Burning the Letters,” “The Courage of Shutting-Up,” and “Lesbos”—keeping in mind the biographical details from the last year of Plath’s life. Next, respond to the following questions in a well-developed essay: Are facts about Plath’s life relevant to your understanding of her works? Are characters and incidents in the work versions of the writer’s own experiences? How are they treated in these poems? 2. “For a Fatherless Son” is in the collection Winter Trees, which also contains the experimental poem “Three Women,” a dramatic poem on childbirth written from three different points of view and with three speakers. With motherhood and childbirth in mind, compare and contrast how the two poems depict motherhood. Why does Plath focus so much on this subject? What significance do these poems have for understanding both Plath the woman and her works? 3. In her 1973 book Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work, Eileen Aird argues that Plath’s originality “lies in her insistence that what has been traditionally regarded as a woman’s world of domesticity, childbearing, marriage, is also a world which can contain the tragic” (17). With Aird’s ideas in mind, analyze “For a Fatherless Son,” arguing how this poem elucidates Plath’s unique contributions to the literary world.

“Daddy” (1962) The 34th poem Plath slated for Ariel, “Daddy” is a controversial poem much debated by critics; Plath wrote the poem just four months before her death.

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It opens as a child’s poem, the speaker a daughter talking directly to her father for 80 lines divided into 16 five-line stanzas, notably employing childlike rhymes and an allusion to the nursery rhyme “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe” in the first stanza. The poem’s content and increasingly violent language, however, are anything but childlike. The poem focuses on the liberation of a woman, who has lived for “thirty years,” haunted by her relationship with her father, a man who died many years before but still occupies the speaker’s imagination, a ghostly specter the speaker vows to kill. Rather than create a realistic portrait of a father, Plath weaves alarming images, ranging from an all-powerful God to a misogynistic Nazi to a sadistic devil to a bloodsucking vampire—a figure she has known personally, privately, and also a superhistorical figure capable of embodying everything from such abstract notions as evil and control to realistic crimes against humanity. The poem is never clear about whether the historical references are meant as a social, political commentary or whether the exalted images merely represent the overreaching imagination of an embittered woman plagued by a psychological disposition that imbues her with nightmarish, schizophrenic, psychotic visions. What is clear is that the speaker is deeply divided and intends to commit patricide, exorcising the daddy figure who has towered over her throughout her life, intimidated her, controlled her, and left her paralyzed, unable to escape her father’s clutches or interact with the world, imprisoned in the space to which she has been confined, and emotionally scarred. Before the poem was published, Plath read it for a BBC radio broadcast in October 1962. Introducing the poem she said: “The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once before she is free of it” (Plath, Collected Poems 293 n. 183). While it would seem clear from Plath’s description that the poem is about a persona she created, many critics have read the poem as a portrait of her father, or at

least a dramatized, hyperbolic image of her father inflected with Plath’s own psychological disposition. Such biographical cues as the story Aurelia Plath has told of the young Sylvia’s vowing never to pray to God again after her father died are woven into the text, tempting readers and critics to interpret “Daddy” as an autobiographical work. One of the many critics to take offense at the poem’s content and follow an autobiographical interpretation, Leon Wieseltier wrote in his 1976 review for the New York Review of Books, “Whatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews” (20). As with so many of Plath’s works, such a reading discounts the universal qualities of the poem, which, in violent language and arresting images, captures a woman haunted by her past relationship with her father and the husband who, for seven years, has controlled her. In order to survive, she has to relinquish the past, to allow it to die, requiring going through the grieving process, whose many stages include admitting anger. Her vitriolic poem announces her desire to be free, voices the courage she has mustered, and reveals the knowledge she has gleaned about herself. Thus, despite its anger and anguish, the poem deals with understanding the self and facing the past: the process of regeneration necessary to heal. What remains to be resolved, however, is how much the speaker really understands about herself and what she plans to do next. Subtle cues such as “The Black telephone’s off at the root, / The voices just can’t worm through” (stanza 14) and “I’m through” (end of stanza 16), imply action, something the speaker will do to remedy her torment. The question remains, What will she do? Will she take her own life (she has already told us, “At twenty I tried to die” in stanza 12)? Will she seek treatment? Will she be able to face the pain and survive? The poem ends without a sense of resolution, leaving the reader with an anguished feeling that mirrors the speaker’s fragmented self, a deliberate lack of closure that enables the poem to be read in many different ways.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Find a copy of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying. In it, she identifies five stages

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that dying patients and those who have lost a loved one experience. Find connections between Kubler-Ross’s ideas and Plath’s poem. Reflecting on these, what psychological insights does Plath’s poem offer? 2. What similes and metaphors does Plath use in this poem to help convey the speaker’s feelings about her father? 3. As does “Daddy,” Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved portrays a woman, Sethe, who is attempting to come to terms with the past. Of course, Morrison and Plath are different writers writing at different times. Nevertheless, interesting comparisons between the two characters can be made. Read Beloved and then write an essay comparing the women who battle the past. How do both deal with loss? How do both intend to heal?

“Fever 103°” (1962) Written just one week after “Daddy,” “Fever 103°” “perfects,” as Tim Kendall observes, “the normally short-lined triplets which immediately become Plath’s standardized pattern: she employs them on seven occasions over the following nine days. Their effect is vertiginous: although ‘Fever 103°’ does sometimes return to the relative stability of an iambic pentameter. . . , usually the lines are shorter, often enjambed, and their downward spiral mimics the velocity of the speaker’s thoughts and desires without allowing pause for a breath” (162). Introducing the poem for her BBC reading of the poem, Plath said: “[It] is about two kinds of fi re—the fi res of hell, which merely agonize, and the fi res of heaven, which purify. During the poem, the fi rst sort of fi re suffers itself into the second” (Collected Poems 293). In “Fever 103°” the speaker vacillates between feverish delusions and astounding insights, “fl ickering, off, on, off, on” all night long (10.2). As do the Pilgrim in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey, and Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid, the speaker performs a ritualistic descent, traveling to the gates of hell, where she is reborn, as her old self dissolves and ascends to paradise. As in Jesus’ death and resur-

rection, the speaker has suffered for “Three days. Three nights.” (11). Here Plath weaves myth with the sickness she has known, providing nightmarish images of hell and of Hiroshima and hallucinogenic visions of becoming her own thermometer as she travels to the bathroom and sees gifts that friends have left to encourage her recovery: She is “Attended by roses, / By kisses, by cherubim, / By whatever these pink things mean” (16.3–17.2). Plath also evokes other figures who have suffered emotionally and psychologically, such as the reference to Isadora Duncan (stanzas 4 and 5), who was strangled with her own scarf in the wheel of a car after the death of her two children. Packed with autobiographical material, literary allusions, references to minority groups, and historical atrocities—larger-than-life, real-world references that some critics have questioned—“Fever 103°” presents serious challenges for readers. Yet, for Plath, such a blend of personal, literary, and historical events constitutes art. In an interview with Peter Orr, for example, Plath described how poetry dealing with personal experiences should “be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on” (170). So, regardless of the criticism she has received for co-opting others’ experiences and cataclysmic events for her own purposes, “Fever 103°” illustrates Plath’s poetic vision of what art should accomplish, a vision she developed over time and arrived at late in her short life.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Tracy Brain argues that the poem’s “images of melting and forced fusion also reflect postwar and cold war concerns with the effects of nuclear explosions on the human body. The 1959 fi lm Hiroshima Mon Amour, directed by Alan Renais and written by Marguerite Duras, seems a likely influence here” (118). First, visit the Hiroshima Archive maintained by Lewis and Clark College: http:// w w w.lclark.edu/~histor y/ HIROSHIM A/. After seeing the devastation of the bomb, view Hiroshima Mon Amour. Finally, evaluate Brain’s claims in a well-developed essay. Is Brain justified in making such bold statements? If so, do the

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images in the poem form a sociopolitical commentary, or do you feel that Plath’s allusions are gratuitous? 2. “Fever 103°” can be seen as an elegy, a poetic form that takes its name from the Greek elegos, a reflection on the death of someone or on sorrow in general. Compare “Fever 103°” with other famous elegies such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865). What do these three poems have in common? Create a well-developed essay that synthesizes the three works and enables readers to appreciate Plath’s poem as part of the elegiac tradition. 3. “Tulips” (March 18, 1962), Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices (March 1962), and “Fever 103°” (October 20, 1962) all deal with hospitals and sickness. With this in mind, write a welldeveloped essay that analyzes the three works and addresses Plath’s hospital obsession. To extend this essay, you may want to read The Bell Jar with all of its hospital scenes, which are often horrific. Do these scenes, largely autobiographical, inform Plath’s late poetry? 4. Note Plath’s incorporation of the Holocaust in “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Mary’s Song” and of Hiroshima in “Fever 103°” and “Mary’s Song.” Early critics often accused Plath of using these events for her own purposes. Do you agree that Plath overstepped her bounds in incorporating these atavistic horrors, or do you subscribe to the aesthetic Plath aspires to, one in which personal events should be linked with larger issues? As you wrestle with this issue, you may want to examine fi rst-person accounts of these events, such as Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958) and Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (1947), or second-generation accounts such as Joy Kogowa’s Obasan (1981) or Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). Consider who has the right to tell of such atrocities and what his or her moral obligations are in doing so. After weighing this evidence, write a well-developed essay on Plath’s incorporation of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima in her works.

“Ariel” (1962) Written on Plath’s 30th birthday, “Ariel” depicts a frenzied horse ride through the English countryside, the speaker’s movement into the unknown out of the stable (the “Stasis in darkness”) and toward “the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning.” Plath ordered her collection Ariel so that this poem would appear as the 15th work. Ariel was the name of the horse Plath rode near the Devon village where she and Ted Hughes had purchased an old church rectory the year before. Yet, rather than merely record a true experience on her horse (Ted Hughes confi rmed after Sylvia’s death that she had had such an experience, when her horse ran uncontrollably and she held on for her life as the horse raced back to the stable), Plath creates a mythic morning ride filled with literary allusions. For example, Plath wrote “God’s lioness” on a draft of the poem: the literal translation of the Hebrew word Ariel, which in Isaiah 29:1–3 and 5–7 stands for Jerusalem, the holy city chosen by God and the city whose fiery end Isaiah prophesies. The destruction of Jerusalem is an apocalyptic event as Isaiah describes it, one that leaves the temple, the connection with divinity and source of religious life, in ruins. “Ariel” focuses on a similarly destructive experience—one in which the self as it is known is transformed at the end of a harrowing ride. The speaker clings to the horse’s neck while berry bushes with hooks threaten and then appear as “Black sweet blood mouthfuls.” One with the horse, who hauls her through the air, the speaker is a “White Godiva”: Lady Godiva riding naked (“I unpeel——”) and a pale, ghostlike goddess who appears corpselike (“Dead hands, dead stringencies”). Capturing the madness of the ride and all of its rushing images, the poem assaults the reader, leaving us with few concrete ideas to hold on to and a string of unprocessed images and sensory details, creating a jarring effect, at once the experience of the loss of self and the violent ride on a horse out of control. As the horse speeds along, the speaker joins the landscape: “And now I / Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.” As a child’s cry rings in the air, the speaker becomes both arrow and morning dew, both of which fly toward redness, the arrow toward the target’s center and the dew evaporating in “the cauldron of morning.”

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Plath associates the speaker’s movement and transformation in the poem with a radical transformation of the self arrived at through suffering, a kind of purgatorial religious experience. While the poem’s title refers to Plath’s horse and the city of Jerusalem, “Ariel” also refers to the magical, androgynous sprite in Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611), who, freed from a witch’s spell by Prospero, conjures the tempest that causes both the play’s shipwreck and mischief. From a Shakespearean perspective, Ariel symbolizes emancipation, the liberation that Prospero grants the elfin sprite. In the Plath poem, this sense of freedom is arrived at after the speaker travels into the sun. As many scholars have, it is tempting to read the poem as an allegory of the end of Plath’s marriage and the beginning of her new journey alone. Regardless of the autobiographical elements, the poem describes the disintegration of an old self and the possibility of renewal. The poem portrays a powerful woman, sexualized, one with a wild animal, heading into the morning light, a place where the self, as the morning dew, dissolves in the air.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In one of his Birthday Letters addressed to Plath, Ted Hughes writes, “Red was your color. / . . . [Red] Was what you wrapped around you.” How does Plath use the color red in “Ariel”? What does the color red signify, and why is it important to the poem’s possible meanings? 2. Consider the structure of the poem: 10 three-line stanzas with a single closing line. That structure appears to be straightforward; with such a structure one might expect some sort of continuity between the stanzas, yet the stanzas are often difficult to decipher; one often has to reread to tell where one image or subject ends and another begins. With this in mind, what effect does the structure have? How does Plath wed content and form in the poem? 3. “Ariel” is a violent poem containing sexual images. What does the poem’s violence signify? Why is it necessary to sexualize the speaker? What significance do the poem’s violent, sexual images have? 4. After consulting a reliable Internet source such as http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Lady

Godiva.htm, analyze how Plath works with the traditional myth of Lady Godiva in “Ariel.” What similarities can you fi nd? What differences? Why is it significant that Plath chose this literary allusion? After considering these questions, write a well-developed essay that explores Plath’s poem and the Lady Godiva myth. 5. In her novel The Bell Jar Plath uses an arrow metaphor to describe the relationship between genders: “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” With this metaphorical description in mind, write a well-developed essay on the arrow imagery/metaphor in “Ariel.”

“Lady Lazarus” (1962) Written soon after Ted Hughes had moved out, “Lady Lazarus,” the seventh in the collection Plath called Ariel, captures the emotional intensity of an embittered woman who, despite her agony and desire for revenge, is determined to restore herself to life again, taking her own life and regenerating herself from the smoldering ashes containing only remnants of what she has been, relics that include a cake of soap, a wedding ring, and a gold fi lling. Suicide is the “art of dying” the speaker does so well, a subversive act that thwarts all attempts that others have made to contain her. The title of the poem alludes to a biblical story found in John 11:2 in which Jesus raises a good friend, Lazarus, from the dead. In the Plath poem, the speaker describes how she, as a cat with nine lives, has resurrected herself repeatedly, restoring her flesh eaten by the grave to life. The poem also concludes with another resurrection motif: the phoenix bird rising out of the ashes, a malevolent being with “red hair” ready to seek retributive justice, ready to “eat men like air.” Introducing the poem in a reading for BBC radio, Plath said: The speaker is a woman who had the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a

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good, plain, very resourceful woman. (Plath, Collected Poems 294)

“Lady Lazarus” is a confessional poem, a selfrevelatory work that records the speaker’s state of mind, in this case, a powerful self-examination of repressed desires, anger, aggression, powerlessness, and the need for vengeance delivered in a vitriolic voice that is not only defensive but also bitterly ironic, filled with a dark humor that captures pain and selfloathing, each unearthed in the process of learning to understand the self. These thoughts flow as if the speaker is speaking to an analyst, a patient unveiling herself to her doctor. In 28 irregularly rhyming tercets (stanzas of three lines linked by a rhyme scheme), the speaker identifies herself as a Holocaust victim. The allusion “Nazi lampshade” refers to a widely publicized image emblematic of Nazi atrocities: a lampshade made out of stretched, tattooed human skin, captured by Billy Wilder in his 1945 documentary of Buchenwald, a German concentration camp. In the third to the last stanza, what remain are only remnants, objects that would not burn, an allusion to Auschwitz, where blankets were made of human hair and soap of human fat, rings were looted from the ashes, horrific medical experiments were conducted on inmates by Josef Mengele, the chief medical officer, and gold fillings were removed by death-camp dentists. Thus, “Herr Doktor,” “Herr Enemy,” “Herr God,” and “Herr Lucifer” evoke a monstrous, horrific image, one that haunts the poem’s speaker, refers to historical personages, and describes the experience of psychoanalysis, during which the speaker becomes the doctor’s “opus,” his work of art made from the dissected pieces of his subject. In the poem this process of revealing the self is also compared to a strip tease, an event during which the speaker becomes a thing to be consumed by others’ eyes, an erotic spectacle over which much is made. Also, this image can be seen, as can the image of the doctor laboring over his artifice, with the nature of poetry: the way that the poet reveals herself in her works. In that sense, “Lady Lazarus” is one of Plath’s most self-reflexive poems, a poem that comments upon her own works with an ironic eye,

not only envisioning how she will be interpreted— how her own life poured into language will become a spectacle—but also comically reflecting on mortality, the subject of so many of her poems, the subject of “Dying . . . an art like everything else,” that the speaker does “exceptionally well.” It is one of Plath’s most famous poems, a work containing Plath’s dark form of parody, in which, by incorporating news, history, psychoanalytic terminology, sexual and racial stereotypes; commenting on her own artistic process as an artist; and revealing her deep-seated fears and anger, she creates a lyric poem capable of generating many, many meanings. To hear Plath reading a version of the poem for a BBC broadcast, visit: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/plath.shtml.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What can be made of the numerous Nazi images in the poem? How do they affect the poem’s tone and enrich its possible meanings? Are they justified? What is their purpose? 2. Read the story of Lazarus in the Bible (John 11:41–44) and then think about why the speaker of the poem calls herself “Lady Lazarus.” What is the significance of the biblical allusion? Why is it significant that this Lazarus is a woman? 3. In JOHN K NOWLES’s A Separate Peace (1959) the character of Phineas is compared with Lazarus, the biblical character. With Knowles’s characterization of Phineas in mind, write an essay that compares Plath’s use of the Lazarus story in “Lady Lazarus” with Phineas in the Knowles novel. 4. On one level, “Lady Lazarus” implicates its readers, who witness a ritualistic death performance. What position does the reader occupy in relationship to the speaker? How can this relationship be characterized? To extend this topic, explore several Plath poems that address specific individuals: the mother figure in “Medusa,” another woman in “Lesbos,” an uncle in “Stopped Dead,” a lover in “Fever 103°,” the speaker’s child in “By Candlelight,” and the maiden aunt in “The Tour.” How do the speakers of these poems portray, characterize, or position the audience to whom the poems are addressed? What role does the audience play in these poems? What statement

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can Plath be said to be making about the relationship between text and reader, art and spectator, actor and audience?

“Child” (1963) Composed during the last week she wrote and just 14 days before she took her own life, “Child” juxtaposes images of a beautiful child with a troubled speaker. In the fi rst stanza the speaker describes the exquisite, singular beauty of her child’s eye, which appears throughout the poem as a clear pool, one the speaker desires to fi ll with love and hope-filled dreams. Yet, the speaker herself, wringing her hands as if debating the inevitable end of things, perhaps even her own demise, stares at a “Ceiling without a star.” As with all of Plath’s works, “Child” is a carefully crafted work of art fi lled with stunning descriptions. Thus, the speaker does not merely want to teach the child and help it discover the world but to fi ll its eye with “The zoo of the new.” Just as the poet plays with language, so does the child meditate on sonorous words, names such as “April snowdrop, Indian pipe, / Little.” Innocent, open, ready to receive the world and all it has to offer, the child appears as a vessel capable of infinite love, a tender creature dependent upon love, nurturing, and understanding for growth. Yet the speaker knows that even though she can understand the child and its embracing of the world, this world is not hers. As if ruminating on her own poetry and her own wish fulfi llment, the speaker, as does Plath, wants to create a different kind of art for the child, one that is “grand and classical” rather than the “troublous” art she weaves. But, as with the speaker, this is not the world Plath inhabited; even such a poem as “Child,” which speaks with tender love and appreciation for childlike wonder, also acknowledges the dark vision that plagued her life and animates her poetry. While we may do a disservice to Plath’s poetry when we read it in terms of her own life and not for its aesthetic merits, knowing Plath’s destiny makes reading “Child” a bittersweet experience, as we feel the love she has for her own children, her desire to preserve their innocence, and her ability

to envision their growth, all the while unable to escape the devastation she feels with her separation from Hughes, the bleak midwinter in London, her own demons. If one of the hallmarks of all great art is the expression of paradox, then “Child” is surely a great work that captures the wonder of life and the inevitability of death, the boundaries that frame human life and make up our day-to-day existence. That Plath in her fi nal days was still able to imagine innocence and joy and order artful creations is the sort of paradox that lies outside any sort of reasoned understanding. It is this paradox that “Child” captures; it is this paradox that makes “Child” one of Plath’s most poignant works.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read other Plath poems that deal with children, such as “For a Fatherless Son,” “By Candlelight,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “The Night Dances,” and “Edge.” What image of motherhood emerges when you think about these poems together? To extend this comparison, read The Bell Jar, noting the many references to birth and motherhood. Does the novel present similar notions of motherhood? How do the novel and poems differ? After thinking these questions through, write a well-developed essay on mother imagery in Plath’s works. 2. Like “Child,” William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Circus Animals” is a self-reflexive poem, one that takes a critical survey of his works of art. With these two poems in mind, compare the two writers’ visions of their own creations. Why is it significant that both reflect in their art on the art they have fashioned?

“Mirror” (1963) “Mirror” fi rst appeared in the New Yorker in 1963 and was later published in Crossing the Water: Transitional Poems (1971), a posthumous collection containing both poems written during the time Plath wrote The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and those that predate and coincide with the Ariel poems, which, published in 1965, just two years

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after her death, propelled her into fame. Like Crossing the Water’s title poem with its ominous language (“The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes”), “Mirror” is a dark, brooding poem, one in which the speaker—a personified mirror on a wall, “silver and exact”—reflects a terrifying vision of the self. In the fi rst several lines the mirror describes itself as objective, without “preconceptions” and “unmisted by love or dislike”—an impartial observer that swallows everything it sees. Ironically, although the mirror is personified, it comments on the world with detached, unemotional observations that, despite the speaker’s claim of being “not cruel, only truthful,” lack the sympathetic, understanding attributes we normally associate with human perception. The fi rst stanza opens with descriptions we often associate with a child’s game, descriptive statements designed to engender guessing, clues given as if a riddle is being posed. Here the juxtaposition of a childlike tone and bleak images creates not only ambiguity but also confusion, leading the reader to question the veracity of the speaker’s statements and observations. Distanced from the reader with its narcissistic vision, the mirror gazes at a pink, speckled wall, which, although the speaker believes (note the connotative language and shift to subjectivity) is part of the mirror’s heart, remembers the many times that mirror and wall have been separated by “faces and darkness.” Pivoting on this spectral image, the speaker in the second stanza describes itself as a lake—an image of depth, the unknown, drowning, and death—over which a woman seeking to understand herself bends. The speaker, which has described itself as a “little god” distanced from human affairs in the opening stanza, now admits it derives a sadistic pleasure in the reflection it provides, seeing the woman’s increasing agitation and tears as a “reward.” In this way it describes itself as a distant, destructive yet creative force, a thing from which a woman derives her notions of what is real. As the speaker, now a lake, depicts how the woman’s image “replaces the darkness,” the speaker reveals that it is aware of the powerful effect it has and the increasing toll time has taken on the woman. The water’s reflective surface dashes the vision of a young girl the woman has harbored and replaces it with a

horrific image of an old woman rising “toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Thus, the speaker, both mirror and lake, makes the woman aware of time, change, and mortality. She gazes into the watery surface, seeking a vision of what is truthful and simultaneously recoiling from the horrific vision that supplants any idealist vision of herself and separates her from her environment. As a meditation on Plath’s increasing instability, a vision of her mortality, a foreshadowing of her suicide, “The Mirror” portrays a desperate woman who seeks to see a whole, integrated human being but who is bound, as is Shakespeare’s Ophelia or Virginia Woolf, to a watery pool.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Many of Plath’s poems contain mirror images. Explore mirror images in the following poems: “Face Lift,” “Totem,” “Last Words,” “Morning Song,” “Insomniac,” “The Courage of Shutting Up,” “Leaving Early,” “Purdah,” and “The Couriers.” What do these images have in common? How do they differ? With your own insights in mind, write a well-developed essay on mirror imagery in Plath’s poetry. 2. Read Claribel Alegría’s “I Am Mirror” (1978). Then, compare the ways Alegría uses the mirror to reflect Salvadoran life with the way Plath uses the mirror to reflect the speaker’s self and the world. After considering both poets’ use of mirrors, write an essay that explores Alegría’s poem as a response to Plath’s. 3. The first line of the second stanza, “Now I am a lake,” alludes to the mythological figure Narcissus. Read about the Narcissus myth in Bullfinch’s Mythology, which can be accessed at http://www. bartleby.com/181/132.html, and note the way other writers have used the myth. With the knowledge you have acquired in mind, think about why Plath evokes this mythological figure. Write a welldeveloped essay that explores Plath’s use of the Narcissus myth and its significance in interpreting “Mirror.” 4. “Mirror” deals with representation: the way things in the real world are reflected in literature. If, on one level, the poem is about poetry, what

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is Plath saying about poetic perception and about the act of creating poetry? 5. The final image in the poem is alarming and stands in stark contrast to the more objective reflections the mirror provides. First of all, consider the difference between objective and subjective perception, the way the two relate and are also complementary. Then, write an essay on the significance of this final image, which, depending on the way you interpret it, may be seen as a more subjective reflection of the speaker. 6. As Tracy Brain describes, two interesting lines from “Mirror” did not make the final edit. In these lines, “the eponymous speaker imagines itself with legs, walking from its room and into the world so that it can show others their reflections: ‘The trees and the stones would know where they stood. / The trees would not dream of redness, nor the stones of transparency’” (29). In a well-developed essay, argue where these two lines might fit best in the poem and how such an addition might alter the poem’s meaning(s).

The Bell Jar (1963) William Heinemann published The Bell Jar in England on January 14, 1963, less than one month before Plath took her own life and died of asphyxiation. The novel appeared under her own name in 1966 (Plath originally employed the pseudonym Victoria Lucas) but did not appear in the United States until 1971, in part because Plath’s mother, Aurelia, objected to the content, which she felt was uncharitable to those Plath had known and might adversely affect her reputation as a writer. Of course, between Plath’s death and the American release of the novel, Sylvia Plath’s had become a well-known name; her dramatic death had elevated her works to cult status. Plath came upon the idea of writing about a woman imprisoned by society and mental illness around the time of her third pregnancy, during which she wrote in her journal: “There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive it, recreate it” (Journals 495). While Plath wrote the novel in 1961, the action of the novel is set in the

1950s and is informed largely by Plath’s experience in 1953: her month-long internship as an editor at a woman’s magazine in New York City and the depressive episode, mental breakdown, and suicide attempt that followed. While it is tempting and even revealing to read the novel as an autobiography, Plath accomplishes more in the novel than record her own life and prefigure her own death. She captures America at a key moment in history, one in which women’s roles were clearly defi ned. To understand The Bell Jar it is important to consider it within the context of 1950s America, a time of postwar prosperity and a time before the “second wave” of feminism that brought about so much change in the 1970s. As today’s fashion magazines offer unrealistic ideals of physical perfection and beauty, the stereotypical woman portrayed in 1950s magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal was a stayat-home mother and submissive wife who lived to keep the pantry stocked, cook, and focus on making her husband happy. Marriage was depicted as the way to happiness, and the fulfi llment of sexual satisfaction was equated with motherhood. After 1945 and the end of the World War II, the birth rate rose 18.5 percent, giving rise to a new generation of children dubbed the “baby boomers.” Corporate employment was seen as a goal; men were expected to be loyal to family and business; this society, in which members of the population were highly mobile, gave rise to the nuclear, isolated family unit, with a shift of women’s responsibilities to raising children. For Plath, the “bell jar” represented the confining 1950s patriarchal structure; her novel defied social norms. Of course, as with so much of Plath’s life, here we find a contradiction: a woman who tried to play the ideal role in society while creating subversive art. The novel traces seven months in the life of Esther Greenwood, who has fi nished her junior year in college and is now working as a writing intern at a New York fashion magazine. As the novel opens, it is June 1953, the same month that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electrocution after being convicted of treason for giving the Soviets atomic secrets, an event that is referred to throughout the novel. In the fi rst half of the novel Esther narrates her experiences during her fi rst month in

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New York as one of 12 editors working on a college issue of Ladies’ Day magazine. As she runs from one event to the next—from photo shoots to meetings to lunches to dates to dances—Esther experiences a gradual mental collapse. On her last night in New York, in a highly symbolic scene, Esther strips on a rooftop and discards the clothes that have formed her identity: “Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.” The second part and majority of the novel takes place back home in Boston, where Esther wanders the streets, becoming more and more unstable, and ultimately is hospitalized after swallowing a bottle of pills. What follows is a slow, harrowing recovery that consists of electroshock therapy and hours spent with psychiatrists. When she fi nally encounters the humane Dr. Nolan, Esther begins to recover, regaining a sense of her self and feeling the “bell jar” lift. As the book ends, Esther, fi lled with “question marks,” is called to a weekly doctors’ board meeting to be considered for dismissal: “The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room.” Typically, the novel is interpreted two ways: (1) as the story of a beautiful, accomplished woman who kills herself and becomes a martyr for women’s rights; (2) as a demonstration of Plath’s mental instability. Yet, there is more at play than a protofeminist diatribe or a psychoanalytic portrait of an author. The novel is very much about identity— the disorientation of the self, the necessity of fi ltering social messages, and the construction of a sense of self despite terrible odds. As such, it speaks for late adolescence and becomes a metaphor for the human condition. Like Holden Caulfield in J. D. SALINGER’s Catcher in the Rye, Esther is a social misfit, a protagonist doomed from the beginning who bears witness to the powerlessness of the individual in relation to the collective. By using the metaphor of illness or insanity, Plath employs an ironic strategy, one that causes us to rethink who/

what is really sane: a disturbed individual or the social world. Throughout the book we see the disparity between maternity (conception, pregnancy, nurturing of infants) and motherhood (daily child care that necessitates a specific role to be played). Thus, on one level, the novel causes us to question whether motherhood is indeed “mutable”—a kind of sociological construct that must fi rst be confronted and deconstructed before it can be escaped. The Bell Jar portrays a suffering woman artist fighting with her own demons, laboring to know herself, searching for an acceptable role to play, and seeking fulfi llment, joy. While it is difficult not to conceive of the novel in a semiautobiographical context, we do The Bell Jar injustice when we do not consider the literary value it holds. As do works by Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf, the novel speaks to those trapped with self-doubts, groping to fi nd a way through the seemingly endless corridors of the mind. As it captures a woman in the middle of 20th-century America making sense out of pain and laments the insensitivity of an oftencruel world, it deals with understanding, the struggle between self and other, interior and exterior, with its dream-fi lled visions and nightmarish pain. As Esther says near the end of the novel, “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.” As Esther does, we all seek a stable self, one not bound by the psychological knots that confi ne us, one not tethered to the social exchanges that defi ne us. While the novel depicts a suffocating world, it also conveys the power of art, the way fiction can provide a needed distance from suffering, the way novels can not only lead us to empathize with others but also help us to understand ourselves. Whether we choose to read The Bell Jar as an autobiography, as fiction, as a psychological portrait, as a representation of women in the 1950s, as a sociological essay on the sexual experience of women, or for the style of the narration and construction of the novel’s form, which in many ways mirrors the disjunctive experience of its narrator, we are drawn into a close

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narrative space with Esther, who, as we have, has an emphatic need to confront radical instability and make sense of the world.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The Bell Jar continues to be a popular text with high school students. Consider why this is so. Evaluate the way the novel portrays adolescence. In what ways does the novel speak to the experience of growing up? Do you think it is an important work for high school students to read? Why or why not? 2. Both Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye contain sensitive protagonists who suffer emotionally. Write an essay comparing the protagonists in each work, focusing on the way their psychological dispositions affect the way they conceive reality. 3. Read Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (the full text of the story can be located at ). What similarities do you see between the works? How can each be said to explore the plight of women? Are the social issues that both works critique still relevant today? Why or why not? 4. On one level the novel focuses on the role of the mother. With this in mind, does or can maternity serve as catalyst for mental breakdown? To what extent is maternity (conception, pregnancy, childbirth, etc.) a fi xed biological reality, and to what extent is motherhood (the daily care of children and the role of the mother) a social construct? Explore these questions in light of the novel. 5. Compare The Bell Jar with other 1960s novels: K EN K ESEY’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), JOSEPH HELLER’s Catch-22 (1961), and KURT VONNEGUT’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Why do these novels focus on mental illness, hospitals, and the need to escape? Taken together, what do they convey about the role of the individual within mid-20th-century society? Are these novels’ social commentaries still relevant today? Why or why not?

6. Plath sets the story of Esther in the context of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Why is this significant? How does this political context relate to the form and content of the novel?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON PLATH AND HER WORK 1. Although Ted Hughes originally collected Plath’s late poems in one volume, Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems, Plath herself ordered her fi nal poems, which she composed sometimes two or three a day, for a collection she named Ariel. Recently, Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement was published and became widely available. Consult this edition of the late poems, which includes a typeset version of the poems and copies of her handwritten manuscript with Plath’s editing marks. What can you tell from studying the poem “Ariel” about her editing process? Think about how the changes she makes— the additions, the deletions, and so on—affect the poem’s form and meaning. 2. Is there a single poem in Ariel that you think is more representative than any other poem of Plath’s art and poetic voice? In what ways does this poem seem representative? How would you interpret the poem to demonstrate Plath’s poetic vision and style? 3. In “Lady Lazarus” the speaker says: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” On one level this is a self-reflexive statement, an admission that the subject of her own poems is often death. Emily Dickinson is another American poet who often writes about death. Drawing upon the late poems of Plath, such as “Lady Lazarus,” compare Plath’s images of death with Dickinson’s in “Because I could not stop for Death—” and “I heard a Fly buzz— when I died—.” What do the two authors share? Why do they both write so much about death? To extend this question, visit the online collec-

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tion of Dickinson’s poems at Bartleby.com, which contains the text of the 1924 edition of her Complete Poems and includes an index: http://www. bartleby.com/113/4053.html. How many poems there deal with death, time, or mortality? How many can be compared with Plath’s works? Write an essay that compares and contrasts the two women’s works and argues why death is central to understanding each author’s oeuvre. 4. Many of Plath’s poems and her novel The Bell Jar deal with suicide. Thinking of other women characters who commit suicide—Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) or perhaps Anna Karenina in the 1877 Tolstoy novel of the same name—why is it significant that major authors use suicide when revealing women characters? 5. Read Albert Camus’s introduction to The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), in which he argues that the only significant question is whether to kill oneself or not. After considering Camus’s ideas, evaluate whether Plath would agree with him. Why or why not? WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Aird, Eileen. Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Alexander, Paul. Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. ———. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. New York: Viking, 1991. Alvarez, A. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971. Axelrod, Steven G. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Barnard, Caroline King. Sylvia Plath. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Basnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath. Towata, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1987. Bloom, Harold, ed. Sylvia Plath. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. London: Pearson, 2001.

Brennan, Claire. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Breslin, Paul. The Psycho-Political Muse: American Poetry since the Fifties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Sylvia Plath. Plymouth, England: Northcote House (in Association with the British Council), 1998. Bundtzen, Lynda K. The Other Ariel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. ———. Plath’s Incarnations: Woman and the Creative Process. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Butsche, Edward, ed. Sylvia Plath: The Woman and Her Work. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977. Dickie, Margaret. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Dickinson, Emily. Collected Poems. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924. Available online. URL: http://www. bartleby.com. Accessed May 21, 2007. Gill, Jo, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Hargrove, Nancy D. The Journey toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath’s Poems of 1956–1959. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1994. Hall, Caroline. Sylvia Plath, Revised. Boston: Twayne, 1998. Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, Revised. New York: Twayne, 1998. Holbrook, David. Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. London: Athlone Press, 1976. Hughes, Ted. Birthday Letters. London: Faber & Faber, 1998. Kendall, Tim. Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. London: Faber & Faber, 2001. Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Lane, Gary. Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Lane, Gary, and Maria Stevens. Sylvia Plath: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978.

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Macpherson, Pat. Reflecting on the Bell Jar. London: Routledge, 1991. Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Markey, Janice. A Journey into the Red Eye: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Garland, 1986. Meyering, Sheryl L. Sylvia Plath: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Newman, Charles H., ed. The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Northouse, Cameron. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1974. Orr, Peter, ed. The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. “A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr.” Modern American Poetry. 1966. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ poets/m_r/plath/orrinterview.htm. Accessed June 22, 2006. ———. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Karen V. Kulik. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Ries, Lawrence R. Wolf Masks: Violence in Contemporary Poetry. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977. Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago Press, 1991.

Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Saldivar, Toni. Sylvia Plath: Confessing the Fictive Self. New York: Lang, 1992. Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Strangeways, Al. Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of Shadows. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Sylvia Plath Forum. Available online. URL: http://www. sylviaplathforum.com. Accessed May 21, 2007. Uroff, Margaret Dickie. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Van Dyne, Susan R. Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. ———. Voices and Visions: Sylvia Plath. New York: Mystic Fire Video, 1988. Wagner, Erica. Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters. London: Faber & Faber, 2000. Wagner-Martin, Linda. The Bell Jar: A Novel of the Fifties. New York: Twayne, 1992. ———. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. ———, ed. Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. ———. Sylvia Plath, the Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Wieseltier, Leon. “In a Universe of Ghosts.” New York Review of Books, 25 November 1976, pp. 20–23. Wood, David J. A Critical Study of the Birth Imagery of Sylvia Plath, American Poet 1932–1963. New York: Mellen, 1992.

Blake G. Hobby

Chaim Potok (1929–2002) What happens when two ultimate commitments—one from your subculture, the other from the umbrella culture—meet in you and you love them both and they are antithetical one to the other? . . . How do you talk on the phone, go to school, ride a train, cross the street, attend class, relate to others, talk to your parents and friends, go out on a date, read texts? What are your dreams? What are your loves, your hates? (“Culture Confrontation in Urban America: a Writer’s Beginnings”)

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erman Harold Potok was born on February 17, 1929, in the Bronx, New York City, to Polish immigrant parents. In accordance with Jewish naming customs, he also had a Hebrew name: Chaim Tsvi. However, it is the combination of his Hebrew and non-Hebrew names with which students will be most familiar: Chaim Potok. And, it is a fitting combination, because he was a man who spent his career attempting to reconcile his Jewish faith with his growing awareness of the secular world around him. Potok was educated in Orthodox Jewish parochial schools—schools that combine learning the Talmud (a sacred Jewish text) with secular courses like mathematics and English. Although an understanding of Judaism is not necessary to read any of Potok’s novels, it is important to know that growing up as a Hasidic Jew meant that his family upheld a strict observance of Jewish customs and rituals. Unlike Orthodox Jews, Hasidic Jews stand out in physical appearance, wearing black suits, a gartel/girdle around the waist, sometimes a round fur-trimmed hat called a shtreiml, and a beard. The physical appearance of the Hasidim signifies their separation from the rest of the world. The Potok home was not marked by the distinct physical appearance of the Hasidim, but they did observe the strict rituals and followed the Hasidic prayer book. Study of the Talmud is highly prized in the Orthodox community, so when Potok showed

an aptitude for visual arts around the age of 10, many confl icts ensued. Judaism adheres to the Ten Commandments, one of which prescribes: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4). Thus, the visual arts are not as valued as talmudic scholarship among Orthodox Jews. Though Potok’s mother indulged his creativity while he was young, after his bar mitzvah she could no longer support him; his father never accepted Potok’s foray into visual arts. To his father the visual arts belonged to the secular world—a world from which they were set apart. Nevertheless, Potok’s creative drive never ceased; when he was an adult, oil painting and photography remained two of his hobbies. By the time Potok turned 16, he had discovered a new form of artistic expression in fictional writing. He cites Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited as the novel that inspired him to explore writing. James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man had a similar effect. He was moved by the emotions and experiences he felt while reading the novels despite his unfamiliarity with the worlds depicted by the authors. He submitted his fi rst written story to a publisher, who did not accept the story but encouraged him by inquiring into whether Potok was ever going to write a novel. By the time he entered Yeshiva Uni-

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versity in 1946, he had made a commitment to be a writer. Potok’s choice to become a writer was met with disappointment in his Hasidic community: The choice alienated him from friends, family, and former teachers. Yet, what sets Potok apart from other writers who discuss the collision of faith and the secular world is that he chose to remain devout. Leaving behind the Hasidic culture he knew, he became a Conservative Jew. However, by removing himself from a culture he had known for so long, he had to reevaluate everything he knew. In interviews, Potok referred to this period in his life, claiming this experience as one catalyst for his recurring theme of “coreto-core cultural confrontation.” Because he chose to pursue writing fiction, he encountered emerging theories about scholarship and identity that challenged and later would reinforce his faith. He was able to face many crises of faith and emerge established more firmly in his beliefs. In 1950 he graduated summa cum laude from Yeshiva University with a B.A. in English literature. Prior to entering seminary, he knew that he wanted to be a writer who would explore Judaism and the 20th century. He went on to the Jewish Theological Seminary in order to gain a better understanding of Judaism, and he graduated with an M.H.L. degree in 1954. In the year that followed he served as the national director of the Leaders Training Fellowship at the seminary. Potok then joined the U.S. Army in 1956 and served as a chaplain in the Korean War for one year. His service as chaplain fulfi lled the seminary requirement for rabbinical ordination, but he knew that his place was not at a pulpit. Potok referred to his experience in the Korean War as the period during which his beliefs were most tested. He was forced into the unfamiliar culture of Asia, and his internal struggles with his faith would become the inspiration for all of his novels. In a 1981 interview with S. Lillian Kremer, he explained about his experience in Korea: “I had been brought up to believe that Judaism made a fundamental difference in the world and I ended up in a world in which Judaism meant nothing. . . . It [being in Korea and experiencing the culture] required a lot of

rethinking” (37). He has said that, ironically, it was in Korea, immersed in the secular world, that he fi rst understood beauty. Returning to America in 1957, Potok took residence as an instructor at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles for two years. In 1958, he married Adena Sara Mosevitzsky, with whom he would later have three daughters. Still haunted by his experiences in Korea, he spent time dealing with his crises of faith. In the interview with Kremer, Potok said that he started backward, contemplating the boy who went to Korea rather than the confl icted soul who left. His experience in Korea became the inspiration for his first novel, which was not accepted by publishers but would later be published as I Am the Clay in 1992. In fact, Potok has admitted that most of the books written by 1981 had main characters who were representations of him—each of the characters confronting something that he had dealt with while coming to terms with his faith. Potok took on several different positions in the Jewish community before his first novel would be published in 1967. He served as the scholar in residence at Har Zion Temple in Philadelphia in 1959–63. He joined the faculty at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1963–64 and worked as the managing editor of Conservative Judaism in 1964–65. While holding these various positions, he also worked toward his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He did not stay at the university to complete the course of study but instead moved to Jerusalem while studying secular philosophy with the intention of getting a better understanding of Western culture—much in the same way he had entered the seminary to understand Judaism better. Two years later, when The Chosen (1967) was published, he was serving as editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society. The Chosen met with critical acclaim and remained on best-seller lists for six months, even reaching the number one position. This novel remains his mosttaught work and has been translated into many languages. The novel explores Potok’s notion of “core-to-core cultural confrontation”—his exploration of what happens when someone embedded in one culture encounters a culture markedly different.

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His writing has been described as semiautobiographical because many of the questions that his characters deal with are issues that he wanted to answer for himself. He returns to the core-to-core cultural confrontation theme in all of his fiction novels: It is Freud for Danny Saunders; it is a scientific approach to the Talmud for Reuven Malter; it is anti-Semitism for David Lurie; it is art for Asher Lev; and it is feminism for Davita Chandal. Because he explores this theme throughout his work, critics have considered this a weakness in his books. Some critics also object to his use of simple language and the fact that none of his characters ever completely leaves behind Judaism. In a world affected by the teachings of Darwin and Freud and haunted by the atrocities of the Holocaust, most authors who approached religion tended to do so negatively. Any type of religious observance was met with the attitude that people who chose to have faith were uninformed and ignorant. However, Potok argued differently: In his novels, and in his life, faith and knowledge coexist. In spite of the many criticisms Potok has endured for the style of his novels, The Chosen marks the beginning of a long career as rabbi, scholar, and novelist. Potok wrote almost 20 works of nonfiction and fiction, as well as countless articles and commentaries. His articles appeared in publications such as TriQuarterly, Esquire, the New York Times Book Review, the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and American Judaism. He also wrote three children’s books: The Tree of Here (1993), The Sky of Now (1995), and Zebra and Other Stories (1998). He received numerous accolades for his work, including a National Book Award nomination and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for The Chosen; the Athenaeum Prize for The Promise; the Jewish National Book Award for The Gift of Asher Lev; the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Achievement Award; an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from La Sierra University; the Barrymore Award for Outstanding New Play for his adaptation of The Chosen; the O. Henry Memorial Award for “Moon”; and the Distinguished Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Potok was actively engaged in the Jewish community as well as in the world of fiction. He had

membership in the Authors’ Guild, the Dramatists’ Guild, the Authors’ League of America, the Rabbinical Assembly, PEN, and Artists’ Equity. Potok spent his life dealing with cultural confrontation, but he never failed to create a new understanding of the world that included both of the cultures that he loved. Because of his continued scholarship, Potok spent much of his life as a lecturer at various universities, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania (1983, 1992–98), Bryn Mawr College (1985), and Johns Hopkins University (1995–98). Although he was diagnosed with brain cancer at the turn of the 21st century, Potok did not slow down his research and writing. His last novel, Old Men at Midnight, was published in 2001, one year before his death, on July 23, 2002. Potok spent more than 30 years contributing to contemporary American fiction, exploring themes such as racial bigotry, anti-Semitism, the horrors of war, and Jewish identity. His books have received international renown, having been translated into a number of different languages. Often labeled a “Jewish-American” writer, Potok accepted that the label needed to exist for purposes of studying literature but always expressed distaste for the term. In one of his later interviews with Elaine M. Kauvar, he responded, “I think the proper way to categorize, if I were to do it, is to say that all of us are American writers with different kinds of subjects and territories” (Walden 77). He did not see himself as a “Jewish” writer in the same manner as SAUL BELLOW, PHILIP ROTH, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Unlike Roth and the early work of Bellow, Potok worked from within the core of Judaism. He claimed that most of the heralded Jewish authors were writing about a Jewish experience different from what he wrote about—they wrote about Judaism from a peripheral understanding. Whereas he had done extensive research into the customs and language, his fellow Jewish-American authors would often misquote or misrepresent Jewish culture. His novels take place in the heart of Judaism and address questions of identity from within the Jewish community. However, he felt that his novels had universal appeal; he did not think that “core-to-core cultural confrontation” was a new idea, nor specific to Juda-

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ism. Danny Saunders has contact with Freud much in the same way that a devout Christian or Muslim might. For someone to remain devout in any faith, in the face of 20th-century developments in science and psychology, he or she would have to undergo the same struggles that face his Jewish characters. In a posthumous article entitled “The Orthodoxies of Chaim Potok,” George Jochnowitz wrote that “Potok chose to write about inner struggles concerning belief and identity rather than love or money. He defined his own area of exploration. His understanding of the characters he created, with all their internal contradictions, is what makes him a great novelist.” Potok focused on one group of people because that was what he knew best, and he believed, as did James Joyce, that “in the particular is contained the universal.” And while there is an underlying darkness to all of his novels, he approached his fiction with the firm belief that there are a benevolent creator and a purpose to life.

The Chosen (1967) Although he was labeled a “Jewish-American” writer, Potok’s fi rst novel received critical acclaim and is often required reading for high school students. The novel also became a commercial hit, gracing best-seller lists for six months after publication in 1967, even hitting the number one spot. The novel has also been adapted to stage and screen: in 1982 as a movie by Twentieth Century Fox, in 1987 as a musical in New York City, and in 2002 as a play cowritten by Potok. The novel tells the story of an unlikely friendship between an Orthodox Jew, Reuven Malter, and a Hasidic Jew, Danny Saunders, spanning the years of 1944 and 1950. The novel is broken into three parts, each section exploring a specific problem in the boys’ friendship. In book 1, they meet and must confront their feelings of hatred toward each other; in book 2, they learn more about each other’s different beliefs, while coping with World War II; and in book 3, they have to deal with the silence between them that results from their fathers’ differing views toward the Zionist movement.

The novel opens on an inter-yeshiva (yeshiva is the name for the system of schools that teach Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud) baseball game between Reuven Malter’s and Danny Saunders’s schools. Most of Reuven’s team is afraid of the other team because that team has never lost and because Danny has a reputation as an intense athlete. Potok builds up the religious tensions between Orthodox and Hasidim when Danny refers to Reuven as an apikorsim, a term that is usually applied to a nonpracticing Jew. Reuven notes that “I was an apikoros to Danny Saunders, despite my belief in God and Torah, because I did not have side curls and was attending a parochial school where too many English subjects were offered and where Jewish subjects were taught in Hebrew instead of Yiddish” (chapter 1). However, the religious tensions between the two characters do not last through the first part of the novel; the term apikoros becomes a joke for the two later on in the novel. When the baseball game begins to go in the favor of Reuven’s team, and he has managed to pitch two strikes against Danny, Danny intentionally hits the ball directly at Reuven, who, rather than duck, attempts to catch it. Because Danny had intended to injure Reuven, the ball moves too fast for Reuven to react in time and hits his glasses, leaving a shard in his eye. Reuven undergoes surgery to remove the glass, only to learn that his eye may never heal properly. While in the hospital, Reuven meets Billy, a blind boy, and Tony Savo, an injured boxer. Both of the characters serve as reminders to Reuven that health is fleeting, and he is most affected by Billy’s story. He does not want his sight to be permanently damaged. His father, David Malter, visits him frequently and enigmatically instructs him to make Danny his friend, a concept in Judaism that carries heavy significance. As his father explains, acquiring a teacher and choosing a friend are two things that the Torah instructs a Jew to do for himself. Choosing a friend, in the sense that David Malter speaks, is something that is necessary for Jews to do in order to learn and understand themselves better. Friends are, as Aristotle wrote, two halves of one soul. A silent understanding exists between the boys throughout the novel, acknowledging the depth of their friendship—

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through hardship and ease—with the repeated statement “If only I’d have ducked.” When the visits of Danny Saunders and David Malter collide, Reuven and Danny recognize his father’s role in their friendship: David Malter had been instructing Danny on the non-Jewish books to read while in the library. The first part of the novel closes as Reuven and Danny have established a firm friendship and Reuven’s eye has healed. As book 2 begins, Reuven remarks on how changed the world appears. He comments that “there was a newness everywhere, a feeling that I had been away a long time in a dark place and was now returning home to sunlight” (chapter 5). Before much of the narrative begins, Potok provides a lengthy section on the history of the Hasidic sect, as told through David Malter. This history is just one of several narrative interruptions in the text that help non-Jewish readers understand more about the novel and Jewish culture. The section is noted for its sympathetic approach to Hasidism as it provides a stark contrast to what Danny reads in Graetz’s History of the Jews. Most of book 2 follows the development of Danny and Reuven’s perceptions of the world. Reuven, with his newfound eyesight, looks at everything with a different perspective, although he distrusts and disapproves of Reb Saunders’s treatment of Danny. When he meets Danny’s father for the first time, it is during a Shabbos service where Reb Saunders intentionally quotes the Talmud incorrectly to see whether Danny will catch the mistake. He does, and the two characters engage in a heated debate about Talmud and commentaries that intimidates Reuven, who cannot understand how a father and son only speak when discussing Talmud. Meanwhile, Danny, who has begun to read Freud and various writings on Hasidism, is disturbed by what he learns, although he never wavers in his faith. When Reuven questions him about it, Danny shrugs off the question and never seems unsettled by the confl ict between Judaism and psychoanalysis. However, the more Danny learns about psychology, the less he wants to inherit his father’s position as tzaddik, a Hasidic rabbi. As book 2 closes and book 3 opens, the impending creation of a Jewish state becomes the focus of the novel, and the two boys enter Hirsh University and

are caught between fathers with two different sets of beliefs. When World War II ended, many countries felt obligated to help Jewish people because of the atrocities of the Holocaust (and arguably, many nations felt guilty for their inaction). The movement of Zionism, which advocated a country for Jews, separate from the rest of the world, developed; they believed Jews deserved this for the suffering and the loss they had endured. In 1947 the world agreed, and in 1948 the nation of Israel emerged. In the novel David Malter becomes very active in the Zionist movement, whereas Reb Saunders stands in staunch opposition. Tensions escalate at Hirsh so that “there was almost a fistfight, and the two students were kept apart with difficulty by members of their respective sides [and] the incident left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth” (chapter 13). After a large Zionist rally in Madison Square Garden, where David Malter had spoken, Reb Saunders refuses to let Danny interact with Reuven. The boys spend most of their first two years of college apart from each other: “Not Freud but Zionism had finally shattered our friendship” (chapter 13). The separation of the characters causes Reuven to spend more time studying the Talmud. He begins to analyze the variant texts of the Talmud, an approach that plays a significant role in The Promise (1969), in which he is one of the main characters. The chronology of the novel begins to move faster, and at the close of chapter 15, the anti-Zionist movement at Hirsch ends because a graduate is killed during a skirmish in Israel. As Reuven begins his third year, Danny approaches him and explains, “‘The ban has been lifted’” (chapter 16). The final two chapters focus on Reuven’s fear of confronting Reb Saunders about Danny’s interest in psychology. Potok provides hints at Danny’s anxiety about approaching his father about choosing psychology and not the tzaddik (in Hasidism, the rabbinical positions are inherited, and as the son of the rabbi, Danny would inherit the role of a rabbi/tzaddik); he has to consider the effect on him, his father, his family, the congregation, as well as a betrothed. Danny receives three acceptance letters from various graduate programs and, upon returning home, finds the letters left in the entry area of his home.

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Yet, his father does not say anything about the letters until weeks later. Invited over to the Saunders’ home during Passover, Reuven, Danny, and Reb Saunders finally talk. The confrontation with Reb Saunders marks the conclusion of The Chosen. They meet in his office, at first discussing Reuven’s plans to enter the rabbinate. The final chapter centers on Reb Saunders. He provides explanations for raising Danny in silence and gives his blessing for Danny to go into psychology. Having taught his son to have a soul, to have compassion for people’s sufferings, Reb Saunders believes that “‘all his [Danny’s] life he will be a tzaddik. He will be a tzaddik for the world. And the world needs a tzaddik” (chapter 18). The novel ends with both boys’ graduating summa cum laude. Critics herald The Chosen for Potok’s minimalist prose and the approachability of the Jewish world he creates. He explains an unfamiliar Jewish world without bogging down the narrative with technicalities of Judaism that might lose readers. Potok adds interruptions in the novel’s narrative to provide a basic understanding of Judaism—in the form of David Malter’s lesson on Hasidism or with short sentences explaining the meanings of Yiddish and Hebrew phrases. It is important to remember that The Chosen stands as the first of many novels where Potok explores his notion of “core-to-core cultural confrontation.” While neither character leaves the Jewish faith, neither character is as fully immersed in his culture as he was; Reuven and Danny have to concede certain aspects of their beliefs.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In the opening chapter of The Chosen, Danny Saunders intentionally hits the baseball toward Reuven Malter, who does not duck but attempts to catch the ball, which breaks his glasses and causes a shard to enter his eye. As a result, Reuven has to undergo surgery to repair his eye. When he leaves the hospital, he remarks that “everything looked suddenly bright and fresh and clean. . . . And there was a newness everywhere, a feeling that I had been away a long time in a dark place and was now returning home to sunlight” (chapter 5). Is Reuven’s new vision a result of the

surgery, or is Potok suggesting something more? What might Reuven have experienced and learned while in the hospital that would affect his perception of the world? If so, how? Do any other characters undergo a change in physical sight (eyesight that worsens) that also suggests a change in their perceptions of the world? How does this character’s perspective change? How does this character relate to Reuven Malter’s experiences? Would you say that this novel, while dealing with the theme of vision and perception, supports Potok’s belief in core-to-core cultural confrontation? Why or why not? What choices do the two boys have to make in the novel, while changing their preconceived ideas about each other and their religious beliefs? 2. Think about the role perception plays in The Chosen. Reuven Malter is the narrator of the novel, but the story is not about just him; it is also about Danny Saunders. How does Reuven’s perspective influence the way you view Danny and his father, Reb Saunders? Why do you think Potok tells this story through Reuven, rather than Danny? How would the story have been different if both boys were either Hasidic or Orthodox Jews, in terms of what you have learned about both sects from the novel? How is Reuven able to help Danny, and how is Danny able to help Reuven? Why is it better for the characters that they are different? What lessons can they learn from each other? Why do you think David Malter was so adamant that they become friends? 3. Chaim Potok wrote a sequel to The Chosen, entitled The Promise (1969). In the novel, Reuven and Danny are much older and are both working on graduate degrees. Like the fi rst novel, the story is not centered on only Reuven Malter; Michael Gordon is a teenager suffering from an unidentified psychological problem who can only open up around Reuven. In another book, Davita’s Harp (1985), Reuven appears again, although in this novel, he is still a teenager in yeshiva. In this novel, he refuses to accept an award from his yeshiva, an award that is the equivalent to the valedictorian award, because he knows that Davita deserves to receive it. Why might it be important for Reuven’s

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character development that he encounter such varied people and their sufferings? How might the lessons he learns with Danny, Michael, and Davita assist him later? How does Reb Saunders’s belief that a rabbi needs to have a heart and compassion help you understand what Reuven has to experience before he can become a rabbi? Why is it so important for a rabbi to have these characteristics? Why might these characteristics be even more important in a post-Holocaust world? Reflect on David Malter’s statement “Now we will need teachers and rabbis to lead our people. . . . The Jewish world is changed. . . . If we do not rebuild Jewry in America, we will die as a people” (chapter 11). 4. In 1959 JOHN K NOWLES published his famous novel A Separate Peace. In that novel, two boys, Gene and Phineas, become friends while enrolled in the summer session at the Devon School in 1942. How might this story parallel the friendship of Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders? How does World War II affect the narratives of both novels? Why might the characters view the war differently? What aspects of their culture might force them to consider the war from different perspectives? Are the two sets of friends similar to each other? How so? In what ways are they different? What might account for those differences? Compare and contrast these two sets of characters.

The Promise (1969) Potok wrote several paired novels; The Chosen and The Promise are his first attempts at continuing character development into another novel. The Promise begins at the end of summer 1950, after Reuven and Danny have graduated. As both characters are headed off to graduate programs, they are brought together by Michael Gordon, a boy who is deeply disturbed but who refuses to speak about his psychological afflictions. While Reuven struggles to deal with his new Talmud instructor, Rav Kalman, Danny struggles to find the answers for Michael’s problems. Rav Kalman

and Michael are angry with the world; however, they demonstrate their anger in different ways. Rav Kalman, a Holocaust survivor, immigrates to America with strong ideas about Talmud and the rabbinate. Because Reuven uses textual criticism, Rav Kalman threatens his smicha (rabbinical ordination). Michael, hating his father for being an excommunicated Jew, despises overly religious Jews, repeatedly telling people, “‘You’re like all the others. . . . You’re no different than the others’” (chapter 1). As the novel concludes, the obstacles experienced by Reuven and Danny ease. The problems have not ended, but for the moment the tensions have subsided. Rav Kalman grants Reuven smicha but does not agree with his method of textual criticism; Michael admits to hating his parents but still has to undergo therapy with Danny for complete healing. Critics consider The Promise to be the most stylistically weak of all of Potok’s novels. They argue that he tries to juggle three distinct narratives in Reuven, Danny, and Michael, and each of the characters’ stories is weakened as a result. He does not blend his explanations of psychology into the text as well as he did with the information in The Chosen. In spite of the criticisms of the text, Potok does deal with weighty issues in Judaism and 20thcentury thought: How do Jewish people, the supposed chosen of God, account for the horrors of the Holocaust? How do people rebuild when everything they have has been destroyed? How can European Jewry and American Jewry coexist to create a stronger Jewish community?

For Discussion or Writing 1. Before the narrative of The Promise begins, Potok quotes the rebbe of Kotzk: “If Thou [God] dost not keep Thy Covenant [that the Jews would be God’s special people and He would always care for them], then neither will I keep that Promise [the promise to worship only one God], and it is all over, we are through being Thy chosen people, Thy peculiar treasure.” How might this statement apply to some of the characters in the novel? Which characters seem most troubled by postHolocaust events? How does Potok treat issues of faith in this novel?

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2. In The Chosen and The Promise, Reuven encounters other Jewish people with different notions of religious faith, who cause him distress. Reb Saunders (The Chosen) stands between him and his friendship with Danny when Reuven’s father becomes active in the Zionist movement; Rav Kalman (The Promise) stands between him and his smicha when he defends his father’s textual criticism of the Talmud. Consider the character development of Reb Saunders and Rav Kalman: Are these men sympathetic characters? Defend your answer. Does Reuven learn something about himself and the world through these men? Does Potok provide any explanation for why these men are the way they are?

My Name Is Asher Lev (1972) Three years after the publication of The Promise, Potok published My Name Is Asher Lev. The novel garnered a better reception than his previous novel, and he was applauded for the different approach to the narration and subject. Potok creates a character who matures in writing—sentence structures and subject matter grow in complexity as Asher ages. However, critics still questioned Potok’s return to characters with an unwavering faith in Judaism. Asher may paint crucifixions, but he observes Shabbos, the Jewish holy day of rest, and the Commandments. The novel begins as a memoir, spanning 1943 to 1970. Asher Lev writes directly to the reader, opening the first chapter with an acknowledgment of his latest paintings (Brooklyn Crucifixion I and Brooklyn Crucifixion II) and the controversy that they have generated. The opening sections read as if he is trying to explain why he has chosen to paint crucifi xions. It is not a surprising way to begin the narrative because as the novel ends, Asher is unable to explain to his parents why he painted the images, something he feels he has to do in order to ease their pain. The novel has been called a glimpse into the development of genius. In the course of the novel, Asher goes from being a young child using cigarette ashes to provide proper shading to a teenager studying under the fictional artist Jacob Kahn, capable of

using any artistic medium he wants. Kahn instructs him that he has to become a great artist because “that will be the only justification for all of the pain [he] will cause.” While under the tutelage of Kahn, Asher eases himself into the inevitable confrontation between his life as an artist and his life as a religious Hasidic Jew. The continual father-son conflict in the novel results from his father’s disapproval of art and the rebbe’s unexpected support for Asher. His mother, Rivkeh, supports Asher by purchasing art supplies without his father’s knowledge. However, the family relationships change when his parents attend the art show with the crucifixion pieces. Having begun to accept Asher’s art career, his parents feel betrayed at his use of an image that represents so much Jewish bloodshed. He damages relationships with his family and Hasidic community, so much that the rebbe asks him to leave. Explaining his motivation, Asher remarks that “if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.” In a section that reads as a plea, he entreats his audience: “I would not be a whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be a whore to my own existence” (chapter 13).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Consider the passages that Asher Lev reads from The Art of Spirit (chapter 8). If “‘every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race,’” then how must Asher Lev free himself? From what ideas and traditions does he break away? Why might his “mythic ancestor” have such a heavy presence throughout the novel? Why might Asher continually feel the need to assert his identity apart from his faith and his father (think about how often he states, “My name is Asher Lev”)? Knowing that Potok revered James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, what connections do you see between Asher Lev and Stephen Dedalus? How do both characters free themselves of family, nation, and race? Do they free themselves in the same way? 2. The crucifixion is a strong image in Christendom, symbolizing Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of Christians, which has dominated art history for

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hundreds of years. However, this same image has a different connotation in Judaism. For Jews, the crucifixion is a symbol of their repression and of anti-Semitism. Considering this, why might it be so controversial for Asher Lev to paint a crucifixion image, and why might he choose to paint it anyway? In fact, what is the twofold controversy surrounding Asher’s painting? Is painting the crucifixion the only problem, or is there something more?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON POTOK AND HIS WORK 1. Scholars break up literary developments into various periods, noting the specific style and choice of topic that seem to occupy most of the literature from the period. Chaim Potok has written during periods that scholars refer to as modern and postmodern. In modern literature, there is an emphasis on humanity’s rationality and scientific experimentation; in postmodern literature, there is an emphasis on a lack of truth and absolutes. Do you think that Potok’s writing belongs in either of these categories? Does he write in a category all his own? How does Potok deviate from these labels? Why might he have chosen to avoid them? Do you think his faith played any role in his subjects and themes? Why might his faith have been an important part of his life and his novels? From what you can gather from reading his novels, why don’t his characters stray from spirituality? How do his characters compare to JewishAmerican authors such as Philip Roth and Saul Bellow? Would you consider Roth and Bellow to be modern or postmodern writers? What might account for the differences in styles and subjects between Potok and others? Can you think of any 20th-century authors you have read who deal with spirituality and religion in the same way as Potok? Can you think of authors from other periods who deal with themes similar to his? 2. Potok detested the label “Jewish-American” author. He often said that he was only an author writing about his own little world—as William

Faulkner developed Yoknapatawpha County in his works and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about Puritan America. Why do you think that these labels exist? What are the benefits and drawbacks of such labels? Would you describe his novels as “Jewish-American”? What makes his novels “Jewish”? Do you think the label accounts for Potok’s commercial success? How did Potok, as a Jewish American, have such success with people who are not Jewish? Do his themes resonate with other readers? How do you explain the universal appeal of his novels? 3. A quest motif is a theme in literature in which the main character must go on a journey in order to fulfill his or her destiny. Quests can be physical journeys, like Beowulf’s going off to slay Grendel, or spiritual journeys, like that of Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. SALINGER), who must come to terms with his place in the world. Potok has been praised and criticized for his use of the identity quest in his books. How have you seen him develop this motif in the books mentioned here (The Chosen, The Promise, and My Name is Asher Lev)? Why might Potok return to this motif again and again? Is this motif especially relevant to Jewish culture, or does it have a place in a broader American literature? Taking what you know about his biography, discuss how his personal questions of faith play out in the novels he writes. 4. In an interview-turned-book version of The Power of Myth, the noted mythology scholar Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers discussed the role of myth in contemporary society. Campbell argues that society needs a mythology because without it, people would not have a secure sense of identity in the world. In the opening chapter, he focuses on the need for an ethos for young people to understand themselves and their place in society. He says: “This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they’re doing the best they can. But they’re dangerous because their own laws are not those of the city. They have not been initiated into our society” (9). Considering what you know of

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Potok’s novels, how might he react to that statement? Would he agree or disagree? Defend your position. How does Potok’s Jewish faith relate to Campbell’s notion of mythology? Would Judaism provide a mythology that might give people a sense of identity and purpose? How so? How might his characters have turned out differently if they did not have their Jewish faith? Would their obstacles have been the same? Would they react the same way to Zionism and the Holocaust if they were not firmly established in their Jewish mythology? WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Diner, Hasia R., Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger, eds. Remembering the Lower East Side: American Jewish Reflections. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Goren, Arthur A. The Politics and Public Culture of American Jews. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Jochnowitz, George. “The Orthodoxies of Chaim Potok.” Editorial. Midstream 50, no. 6 (September– October 2004): 24–26. Kremer, S. Lillian. “An Interview with Chaim Potok.” Studies in Jewish Literature 4 (1985): 84–99. Potok, Chaim. The Book of Lights. New York: Knopf, 1981. ———. The Chosen. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967. ———. “Culture Confrontation in Urban America: A Writer’s Beginnings.” In Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature, edited by Michael C. Jaye and Ann C. Watts, 161–167. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981.

———. Davita’s Harp. New York: Fawcett Books, 1985. ———. The Gift of Asher Lev. New York: Knopf, 1990. ———. I Am the Clay. New York: Knopf, 1992. ———. In the Beginning. New York: Knopf, 1975. ———. My Name Is Asher Lev. New York: Knopf, 1972. ———. Old Men at Midnight. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. ———. The Promise. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1969. ———. Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews. New York: Knopf, 1978. Roskies, David G., ed. The Literature of Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988. Rubenstein, Richard L. After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism. 2d ed. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Silver, Elizabeth. “Silent Territory: Author Chaim Potok Maps His Past through His Writing, Part I.” JVibe. Available online. URL: http://www.jvibe.com/ popculture/potok.shtml. Accessed May 21, 2006. ———. “Silent Territory: Author Chaim Potok Maps His Past through His Writing, Part II.” JVibe. Available online. URL: http://www.jvibe.com/pop culture/potok2.shtml. Accessed May 21, 2006. Wade, Stephen. Jewish American Literature since 1945: An Introduction. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999. Walden, Daniel, ed. Conversations with Chaim Potok. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. ———. Studies in American Jewish Literature, Number 4. New York: State University of New York Press, 1985. Wirth-Nesher, Hana, ed. What Is Jewish Literature? Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994.

Sarah R. Fish

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) What is accomplished if the man attains power and prominence at the cost of this playing down to the masses? It is not he that triumphs, it is not his ideas and standards. (“From Ayn Rand’s Unpublished Writings: Philosophical Journal,” Objectivist Forum, August 1983)

A

yn Rand, a writer who accomplished the rare task of working out a formal system of philosophy through fiction writing, was born Alissa (Russian for Alice) Zinovieva Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in the Russian city of St. Petersburg to secular Jewish parents, Zinovy “Fronz” Zakharovich Rosenbaum and Anna Borisovna Rosenbaum. As such, she was profoundly affected by two Russian revolutions, the fi rst in February 1917, which she supported, and the second, in October of the same year, which she opposed. She was a young partisan of the fi rst, led by Alexander Kerensky. She has called this Russian epoch the only time she “was synchronized with history.” The second, the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, which she opposed, resulted in her father’s business’s being nationalized. At the age of 12, Rand lost the pleasant and affluent life of foreign travel and resort vacations to which she had grown accustomed. As the revolutions transformed St. Petersburg into Petrograd, then into Leningrad, life had become a struggle with scarcity and long lines waiting for bare necessities. In 1918, her family fled these privations to live in Crimea until 1921. Despite all this, Rand did attend Leningrad State University, studying math, history, philosophy, and engineering; she graduated in 1924. Having known since childhood that her greatest ambition was to become a writer, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts to study screenwriting in 1924. Soon,

however, she despaired of finding the intellectual freedom she needed to fulfill her goal in Soviet Russia; for this reason, she obtained a passport in 1925 and traveled to the United States in 1926, apparently intending never to return. As people sometimes do when starting a new life, Alissa Rosenbaum changed her name. For her fi rst name, she adopted Ayn, (rhymes with mine,), and for her new last name, she chose Rand, according to some sources, because it was the name of the typewriter she was using. After staying with an aunt in Chicago for six months, she tried to “make it” as a Hollywood scriptwriter. While working toward this goal, she supported herself with many less glamorous jobs, including waitressing, envelope stuffi ng, and wardrobe clerking. Standing in line one day, she caught the eye of the director Cecil B. DeMille, who hired her as a movie extra. More important than those few walk-ons, however, was her meeting another movie extra, Francis (Frank) O’Connor, whom she married on April 15, 1929. Giving up acting, O’Connor tried his hand at a number of professions, including flower arranging and painting, but he would forever be most famous as the husband of Ayn Rand. Besides the support and inspiration that Rand credited to O’Connor, their marriage enabled her to become a naturalized American citizen on March 13, 1931. Finally in a good position to concentrate on her writing, Rand was able to focus on her fi rst novel,

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We the Living, begun in 1930 and fi nished in 1933, although it was not published until 1936. Its protagonist, Kira Argounova, a young woman who wishes to become an engineer, struggles against the Soviet ideal of citizens’ renouncing all “selfish” ambitions to live for the state. This heroine, the most autobiographical of all Rand’s characters, struggled, as did the young Alissa Rosenbaum, with the added burden of upper-class parents. While Alissa managed to leave, however, Kira’s fate was far less kind and she is left to fight, along with Leo (Lev) Kovalensky, a former aristocrat himself, and Andrei Taganov, an idealistic young Communist Party member, to fight for self-expression and happiness against a system of grinding oppression. This struggle against collectivism set the tone for all Rand’s future works. In the meantime, after writing several movie scenarios and scripts (one of which became a movie), Rand dramatized this struggle between the one and the many and enjoyed her first public success as a writer when her play Woman on Trial (original title Penthouse Legend) premiered in Los Angeles in 1934. Shortly thereafter, Rand and her husband moved to New York City for the 1935 Broadway premiere of the same play, renamed The Night of January 16th. Built around the trial of a woman, Karen Andre, accused of killing her lover, the entrepreneur Bjorn Faulkner, the play introduced the unique device of drawing jury members from the audience. Despite a constant battle between Rand and her producer, the value-driven arguments remained an intrinsic part of the play for its successful six-month run; this rhetorical strategy also set the tone for Rand’s future writings. In 1935, having already begun writing the novel that was to become her greatest publishing success, The Fountainhead, Rand paused to complete her novella Anthem in 1937. Published in England the following year, it did not find a U.S. publisher until 1946. This novella is unlike anything Rand wrote before or after in the simple, yet poetic language of its first-person narration, as well as the accessible, parablelike quality of the story. It is also unique in that its brevity and its expired copyright have made it

one of the most widely available works of fiction on the Internet. Again, this story pits the individual against the collective. However, this tale’s narrator lives in some future society where individuality is so suppressed that he has no name and no conception of the word I. Labeled Equality 7–2521 for convenience sake, the narrator begins his account, “It is a sin to write this.” The sin is not just in the writing itself, since the Council of Vocations has deemed him fit only to clean the streets, but also in the fact that Equality 7–2521 is writing for no one but himself. In fact, the very condition of being alone is a sin. Contrary to an older tradition of creating future utopias of collective societies, this work creates the opposite, called a dystopia, which shows the worst possible result of what Rand saw as society’s slide into a more and more collectivist mindset. The result is a medieval stagnation symbolized by reliance on candles for light and refusal to allow progress not generated by collective “research.” When Equality 7–2521 reinvents an electrical form of light, the Council of Science shrinks back in terror and condemns him and his invention to destruction. This is the clearest introduction to Rand’s opposition of collective stagnation and championing of individualistic progress. As stated previously, her next novel, The Fountainhead, established Rand’s reputation as a fiction writer and an advocate of individualism. By the fourth decade after its initial publication in 1943, it had already sold 4 million copies. Shortly after its initial publication, Hollywood paid Rand $50,000 for the rights, then hired her to write a screenplay for the movie that eventually starred Gary Cooper as the novel’s architect protagonist, Howard Roark, and Patricia Neal as his self-destructive love interest, Dominique Francon. Rand and O’Connor returned to Hollywood so that she could work on this and other screenplays. While her later work, Atlas Shrugged, demonstrated a more refined political and philosophically complete analysis of the struggle for selfdetermination, The Fountainhead is widely perceived as more psychologically compelling. As she did in The

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Night of January 16th, Rand used courtroom drama and the persuasive speeches embedded in such drama in The Fountainhead to argue the rights of individuals against collective pressure. Howard Roark, the novel’s protagonist, is tried for dynamiting Cortlandt Homes, a low-cost-housing project that he designed for Peter Keating, another architect and also his foil. Roark does so knowing that the widespread rejection of his modernist designs will make it impossible for his project to be built otherwise. He lets Keating, who is far inferior as an architect, take credit for the design on the one condition that it be built exactly as Roark designed it. Roark argues so persuasively for the rights of the individual over the products of his own mind that the jury acquits him. This fiction writing as advocacy, which some critics have called “polemics,” is expanded greatly in the television speech of John Galt, the idealized inventor/protagonist of Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged. In fact, Rand’s philosophy of objectivism seemed to grow at the expense of her fiction. As she refined and elaborated her thinking on how we know things, character and plot “take a back seat” to philosophical debate and explanation. For instance, Kira Argounova’s arguments with her Communist friend in We the Living expand into the courtroom rhetoric of The Fountainhead and then mushroom into Galt’s threehour TV speech in Atlas Shrugged, interrupting the action of the novel for almost 60 pages. It is perhaps to be expected, therefore, that Atlas Shrugged would be Rand’s last work of fiction as she dedicated herself entirely to explicating her epistemology in her articles for the Objectivist Newsletter, renamed the Objectivist, and, later still, the Ayn Rand Letter. Before this long speech, however, the novel has established that all the world’s true innovators (Atlases) have shrugged off the world’s burdens and gone on strike. Two of the last hold-outs against this strike, Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart, have struggled to keep things from spinning apart, all the while trying to solve the mystery of where all the rest of the world’s innovators are disappearing to and why. Rearden, who invents a metal stronger and lighter than steel, and Dagny Taggart, who heroically keeps her family’s railroad running while her brother, James, takes the credit, are eventually won

over and end up with Galt in their capitalist utopia, Mulligan’s Valley, or Galt’s Gulch, as it is also called. As some critics have pointed out, this shift from the more character-driven story of The Fountainhead to the more idea-driven writing of Atlas Shrugged is signaled by the naming of their respective parts; sections of The Fountainhead are named for characters, whereas sections of Atlas Shrugged are labeled according to Aristotle’s principles of logic such as “Non-Contradiction” and “A is A.” Thereafter, while Rand taught fiction-writing classes in 1958, her own writing focused on a more straightforward exposition of her evolving political, economic, and philosophical defense of selfishness and capitalism. Rand also spoke at such venues as Queens College, Yale University, and the Ford Hall Forum on issues such as the destructive force of faith and the “Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age” and received an honorary doctorate from Lewis and Clark University in 1963. Along with Nathaniel Branden, who focused on the psychological aspects of the philosophy that had become known as objectivism, Rand continued to explain her views in articles for the Objectivist Newsletter, started in 1962 and later called the Objectivist (1966). She also helped Branden establish his own Nathaniel Branden Institute, offering both live and recorded lectures on objectivism and psychology. Rand even appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in 1967. In 1969, Rand published The Romantic Manifesto, which bemoaned the death of romanticism in all but a few “bright spots in a stagnant gray fog.” By this time, objectivism was developing schisms. In the first issue of her new Ayn Rand Letter, which she began publishing in 1974, she excoriated Branden and explained their falling out in philosophical, rather than personal, terms. However, it seems clear in retrospect that a broken affair played a large part in the dispute that was to destroy objectivism’s unity as a movement and spell the death of the institute. See Barbara Branden’s book The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986) or the fi lm (1999) of the same name for more details on the personal and tumultuous events leading to the splintering of objectivism. While she continued to deliver speeches at West Point (1974) and Ford Hall Forum (1977), to

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write, and to glean such honors as inclusion at a White House dinner for Alan Greenspan’s swearing in (1974) and another honoring Malcolm Fraser (1976), as well as a Ford Hall Forum luncheon in her own honor, all was not well. Besides her intellectual and professional disputes with former followers, Rand’s health had begun to fail. After losing part of a lung to cancer, Rand suffered an even greater loss in the death of her husband and lifelong love in November 1979. By 1980, she had broken with most of her “inner circle”; she died in New York, in her 34th Street apartment, on March 6, 1982. While her intellectual legacy is still quite controversial, this much is clear: Her system of philosophy and epistemology called objectivism remains a force to be reckoned with. More than 25 years after her death, Rand is a palpable Internet presence with several sites dedicated to keeping her ideas alive. Her books still sell very well, continuing to attract new followers, especially among the young. While some critics have accused her of creating an elitist philosophy reminiscent of that of Frederick Nietzsche, she herself pointed out that Nietzsche’s “rebellion against altruism consisted of replacing the sacrifice of oneself to others by the sacrifice of others to oneself,” abandoning reason and principle. In fact, one may see in The Fountainhead’s characters Howard Roark and his foil, architectural critic Ellsworth Toohey, exemplars of “healthy” and “unhealthy elitism.” As Roark argues at his trial, selfishness and egoism are the ultimate virtues, since it is only through them that an individual can pursue his or her goals and, thus, contribute to society’s progress. Unlike other defenders of capitalism, Rand did not defend the selfishness of the marketplace as a private vice yielding public good, but as a virtue in and of itself.

We the Living (1936) Having written and sold a screenplay, Red Pawn (1932), as well as a stage play, The Night of January 16th (1934), Rand completed her first novel, We the Living, in 1934. The U.S. publisher the Macmillan Company and the English publisher Cassells and Company did not publish it, however, until 1936.

A stage adaptation titled The Unconquered was performed on Broadway in 1940, and the novel was also filmed in Italy in 1942. Rand called this fi lm “excellent” and praised especially the actor playing the role of Kira. In short, the novel traces the intersecting struggles of three young people, Kira Argounova, whose family is returning to Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) when we meet her; Lev Kovalensky, an aristocrat also known as Leo, who has lost both his wealth and his status through the revolutions; and Andrei Taganov, an idealistic Communist Party member, against a system that preaches the credo that people should live for the state. As do her later fictions, this novel pits individuals, with their dreams and talents, against the crushing power of collectivism. Unlike later novels, such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, We the Living focuses more on character and plot and thus may be seen as her most successful novel in terms of its story and artistic coherence. Rand has called We the Living the most autobiographical of her novels, in terms of its ideas, not in the facts of her life, although there are a few parallels. She and her young heroine Kira both accomplished those most difficult “coming of age” tasks under the new Soviet rule; both were from well-off families whose businesses were nationalized by the Communists; both fled with their families to Crimea, then returned to the newly named city of Petrograd; and both were ambitious, intelligent individualists. While Rand aspired to be a writer and a philosopher, her heroine, Kira, wanted to be an engineer and a builder of bridges. From the novel’s first sentence, however, we sense the grimness in Kira’s new environment, which foreshadows her ultimate defeat. Moreover, by opening with “Petrograd smelt of carbolic acid,” Rand also signals the shabbiness of the new totalitarian state. Carbolic acid is used to kill lice; as such it symbolizes the poverty of the unclean, crowded masses. For a child of the upper middle class, as the young heroine, Kira, is, the contrast between her sweet accustomed life and these choking acidic fumes in the swarming gray city is palpable. When we first meet them, Kira and her family are crowded into the train. However, Kira is the only one who seems impervious to the

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sadness of “humans . . . bundled in ragged overcoats and shawls.” In contrast to the weariness all around her, she stands “straight, motionless, with the graceful indifference of a traveler on a luxurious ocean liner.” In fact, her calm, composed indifference to even her own shabbiness is described as the “defiant, enraptured, solemnly and fearfully expectant look of a warrior who is entering a strange city and is not quite sure whether he is entering it as a conqueror or a captive.” As with most of her idealized heroes, Rand describes Kira as straight, slim, and graceful. The warrior reference, together with several reminders of Kira’s gray eyes, can be read as an allusion to the Greek goddess Athena. Traveling with her are her father, Alexander Dimitrievitch Argounov, who is weary but not ready to give up on life, believing that this Soviet regime cannot survive and he will, at last, be able to resume his life as a self-made entrepreneur. Kira’s mother, Galina Petrovna, covers the book she is reading so other passengers cannot see that it is written in French. In contrast, Kira’s older sister, Lydia, flaunts the fading remnants of her lost status, the lace at her throat, her darned silk gloves, and a bottle of perfume. Kira, Lev, and Andrei, plus family members, both immediate and extended, reflect many possible attitudes toward the new Soviet state. Kira, for instance, is intent on her own goals and observations, with the confidence of the young that she can keep herself above the gray muck of everyday life. At one point, however, she tries to leave Soviet Russia with Lev, the handsome young aristocrat she falls in love with at first sight. Lev has nothing but arrogant contempt for his country’s new leaders; however, he is already in trouble with them. While Kira’s love for Lev is unshakable, her relationship with Andrei, the idealistic young Communist Party member, is far more interesting. While disagreeing on everything political, they seem destined to be friends, and he risks his own party standing to help her, and Lev, several times. Kira’s cousin, Victor Dunaev, is a foil to all three main characters and the ultimate opportunist who will use every ounce of his considerable crowdpleasing charm to advance his own career. He betrays the woman he loves to marry someone more

politically advantageous. As a party member from the ruined aristocracy, he must work doubly hard to prove himself loyal; he does this by betraying his own sister for hiding her counterrevolutionary lover from the state police. The young couple marry in the hope of being sent to the same prison in Siberia, at least. When they learn that the marriage makes no difference and they are still being sent to prisons far apart, they make one last appeal to Victor to intervene. Despite the fact that people usually did not survive a 20-year prison sentence in Siberia, Victor refuses them even this one humble request that they be allowed to die together. After betraying them to gain his new standing in the party, he fears that any intervention on their behalf, no matter how small, would compromise his hard-won status. While Kira doggedly pursues her dreams of love, she loses her chance of a career when children of all formerly upper-class citizens are expelled from the university. Then, Lev contracts tuberculosis and Kira has no money to send him to a private sanatorium; after fruitless months of trying to find him a place in a state-run institution, she fears he will die soon. In the meantime, Andrei has declared his love for her, and she, despite her respect for him, lies to him about her need for money to save her family from starvation. She becomes Andrei’s mistress and uses the money he gives her to save Leo. When Leo returns, recovered in health but corrupted in spirit, it is in the company of an appalling and vulgarly pretentious but wealthy woman, Tonia, whose desire for Leo is not much of a secret. Leo is caught in a black-market deal with Tonia and her husband, Koko, involving another Communist Party member, Pavel Syerov, Andrei’s enemy. In fact, in his cynical, self-serving black marketeering, Pavel is the perfect foil for the idealist Andrei Taganov. In a novel where the good are overwhelmed by the grim oppression and corruption around them, it makes perfect sense that Lev would be scapegoated and Andrei would rescue him for Kira’s sake, only to give up on his own dream of a life in a noble Soviet Russia with the woman he loves; Andrei commits suicide. Released, Lev can no longer deal with the situation and leaves with Tonia, who can support him

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and get him out of Soviet Russia. His prostituting himself for Tonia is a far more corrupt version of Kira’s affair with Andrei, since it lacks both respect and the motivation of saving a loved one’s life. Kira is ultimately shot in her attempt to escape across the border in the frozen north. In her last scenes, we watch her struggle to keep walking through the blinding whiteness in the wedding gown she wore as camouflage against the white snow, while her heart’s blood seeps slowly into the precious lace and falls to the ground. Her last vision is one of her beloved Lev in a nightclub and she smiles “her last smile to all that could have been.” Perhaps it is the tragic nature of this story that lends it the literary structure that some fi nd lacking in Rand’s later novels.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Bildungsroman (from Ger. Bildung, or “development,” and Fr. roman, or “story”) is the literary term for a novel of a sensitive young protagonist coming of age and finding her or his place in society. How does the story’s setting in the newly established Soviet system complicate Kira Argounova’s development? 2. Given that marriage is usually part of a character’s Bildung, especially that of a female protagonist, discuss the irony of the outfit Kira is wearing when she is shot. Look up the word irony in any good literary reference work or college Web site if you have any doubts about its meaning. 3. In “The Goal of My Writing,” from her nonfiction work The Romantic Manifesto (1969), Rand wrote, “The motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man.” Considering this: (a) discuss how each character meets or fails to meet this goal as an ideal character, and (b) discuss the three main characters, Kira, Leo (Lev), and Andrei—in terms of their hamartia, meaning “characteristics that help to cause the characters’ downfall,” often referred to as a “tragic flaw.” How does their hamartia contribute to each of their tragic fates? 4. Compare Kira to other Bildungsroman characters, such as Holden Caulfield of J. D. SALINGER’s The

Catcher in the Rye or Nick Carraway of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 5. Do Kira, Lev, and Andrei seem destined to be defeated? Why or why not?

Anthem (1938) Published in England in 1938, Anthem did not find an American publisher until Pamphleteers, Inc., picked it up in 1946. As Leonard Read explained in the publisher’s foreword: “We had not intended to publish novels. But the purpose of our publishing venture is to further the cause of freedom and individualism. So we decided to offer you this novel.” Rand’s novella, Anthem, shows us a bleak world in which the struggle between the individual and society has been settled in society’s favor. This dystopian vision of the future can also be found in examples of speculative fiction such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Simply put, this genre contradicts the traditional 19th-century utopian tradition in which collectivism is posited as something that could work. While a utopian novel portrays the “best of all possible worlds,” a future in which all confl ict is settled and all live in harmony, a dystopian (or dystopic) novel portrays the “worst of all possible worlds,” usually one in which individuals have lost all power of self-determination. In fact, Anthem’s world is one in which all individuality has been suppressed to the point where the word I has been lost altogether and “alone time” forbidden. “It is a sin to write this,” the novel begins. “It is a sin to think words no others think,” it continues, “and to put them down upon paper no others are to see.” “Our name,” the protagonist tells us, “is Equality 7–2521,” a name that is written on his copy of the iron identity bracelet everyone wears. The tale of this society after its “Great Rebirth” is told in the simple language of a parable and largely in flashback. The “Unmentionable Times” have passed away, and all live now with the “Great Truth” that “all men are one and that there is no will save the will of all men together.” Equality 7–2521 is alone in a dark tunnel because he has escaped the collec-

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tivist oppression of his society, but he did so not just to save himself but also to save his great invention, condemned by the stagnant authority of the World Council of Scholars. An exceptional man in a society that abhors exceptional men, Equality had been condemned to live his life as a street sweeper, a fate he accepted as his just punishment for the sin of pride, the “Transgression of Preference.” He had imagined that the Council of Vocations might, if he wished it hard enough in the dark privacy of his own mind while his peers slept, send him to the collective Home of the Scholars when it was time for him to leave the Council of Students. He accepts their judgment with a fervent wish that it will help him work to atone for his sin of pride against his brothers. Try as he might to avoid it, however, Equality 7-2521 seems destined to live out the same struggle against conformity and oppression that all of Rand’s exceptional heroes do. Working one day with the feeble-minded Union 5-3992 and the tall, strong International 4-8818 (his friend, although such a label is forbidden), Equality stumbles upon an artifact from the dark, distant Unmentionable Times. He descends into what turns out to be an old subway entrance, arguing that it cannot be forbidden since the council does not know about it. By accident, he rediscovers that most forbidden of all pleasures, a private place. Predictably, he begins to invent opportunities to sneak away to work privately on all the mysteries he finds there, expanding upon the limited knowledge written in the manuscripts he has stolen. He uses the wiring and “globes of glass” he finds in his tunnel to reinvent the lightbulb. Thinking what an advance the creation of light without burning wax candles would be, Equality determines to confess his crime so that he may offer his invention for the benefit of all. In the meantime, he has met another who attracts his forbidden attention, a woman named Liberty 5-3000, whom he renames, for himself only, the Golden One. They have been communicating privately, since their conversations demonstrate a further Transgression of Preference (selecting appropriate mates is another function of the state, this one administered by the Council of Eugenics).

Despite his best efforts, Equality cannot convince the Council of Scholars that his lightbulb would be anything more than a fearful disruption of the established routines and settled lives of the collective and the Department of Candles, especially. So mired in a nearly medieval stagnation that they cannot allow so much progress, they condemn Equality to death and his invention to destruction. He escapes from the city into the Uncharted Forest to save his invention and await the “certain fate” of being torn asunder by wild animals. Showing her own courage and initiative, Liberty 5-3000 tracks him through the forest until she catches up with him. Together, as Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden, Equality and Liberty fi nd themselves with the world all before them and, in the process of exploring the forest, fi nd a house fi lled with all the abandoned wonders of our modern age. For Equality and Liberty the fi rst and most obvious wonder of this house, however, is its size. Accustomed to living communally and sleeping in enormous halls, they are stunned by the wonder of a house so small that it can hold so few. Having lost the concept of the nuclear family, they are staggered to discover a bedroom with only one bed in it. The greatest glory of this house, however, is its library, fi lled with books wherein the couple rediscovers the word I, among other lost wonders. Thereafter, they rename each other Gaia, for the ancient Greek earth mother, and Prometheus, for the benefactor who stole fire from the gods as a gift for all mankind. Soon, they vow, they will return to the gray collective city to rescue those few among their “brothers,” such as International 4-8818, whom they need to re-create a world where the recovery of the ego and individualism will establish a new age of progress for the human race.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare Anthem to other dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s 1984. After looking up the meaning of determinism, in both a philosophical and a literary sense, consider how this concept might explain why Anthem ends happily while 1984 does not.

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2. Other collective dystopias, such as Orwell’s 1984, show tyrants using advanced technology to enforce their tyranny, while technology in Rand’s Anthem has all but vanished. How would you account for this difference? 3. On a much smaller scale, Anthem traces the same postapocalyptic scenario as does Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged. In other words, it belongs to the genre of literature in which a new “race of men” emerges as the world’s true leaders after its present leaders have made a thorough mess of things. Research this genre and consider how both Anthem and Atlas Shrugged fit this genre.

The Fountainhead (1943) Rand began work on The Fountainhead in 1935. Interestingly enough, she researched her topic by working, without pay, as an architect’s secretary for a year. Rand found an American publisher (BobsMerrill) in 1943 and an English publisher (Cassell) in 1947. By August 1945, The Fountainhead had reached number 6 on the New York Times best-seller list. This novel, centered on the creative-geniusarchitect Howard Roark, is Rand’s true claim to fame; within four decades of its first publication date, The Fountainhead had sold 4 million copies. By the end of its first year in print, Rand had already sold the rights to Hollywood for $50,000, which was a substantial sum of money at the time. She returned to Hollywood with her husband, Frank O’Connor, to write the screenplay that would become a movie starring the box-office stars Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in 1949. The Fountainhead focuses on characterization. As such, the novel makes extensive use of foils, or characters whose attributes or circumstances can be fruitfully compared and contrasted to clarify both characters and themes. Several such pairs of foils spring to mind. Howard Roark, for instance, the self-determined genius of modernist architecture, is strongly contrasted with another architect, Peter Keating, whose craven need for approval makes him pander to the mob and the beaux-arts architectural clichés of their time. While Peter Keating’s confor-

mity wins him acclaim as a student and a cushy job upon graduation, Roark’s rebellion against the cant of his time and trade causes him to be expelled from school and prevents him from fi nding work as an architect. “Howard Roark laughed” is our introduction to Rand’s protagonist; then, “He stood naked at the edge of a cliff.” In contrast, here is our true introduction to Keating: “Peter Keating looked at the streets of New York. The people, he observed, were extremely well dressed.” Typically, Roark is alone, happy in his own skin and content with his own thoughts despite having just been expelled from school. Also typically, Keating is outer-directed, overly concerned with appearance, and looking for clues from those around him, for this is where he must acquire his sense of self. As did Victor Dunaev in Rand’s We the Living, Peter Keating of The Fountainhead abandons the woman he truly loves, the quiet, unassuming, and unremarkable Catherine Halsey, to make a more advantageous marriage, in this case, to the assertive and beautiful Dominique Francon, the boss’s neurotically self-destructive daughter. Obviously, Dominique and Katie, as Peter calls her, can be seen as another pair of foils. Simple and sweet, Catherine trusts Peter and is crushed into cynical career obsession by his betrayal. Tracing an opposing trajectory in character development, Dominique begins in cynical defeat, believing that evil and mediocrity will destroy all that is singular and excellent, to have her faith in the human power of creative individualism restored through Howard Roark’s victories. Gail Wynand, another foil for Howard Roark, shares Roark’s excellent mind and creative potential. However, Wynand has engineered his own corrupt defeat by using all his talent to pander to the masses through his newspaper the New York Banner, famous as “the most vulgar newspaper in the country.” Unlike Roark, Wynand is scarred by the poverty of his youth and willing to do whatever it takes to create his own empire and get rich. While Roark is selfish in the sense of caring passionately about his own creative individualism and the products of that talent, he cares little for money.

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Ellsworth Toohey, the novel’s villain, writes for Wynand’s newspaper as its architectural critic; not surprisingly, he champions Keating and vows to destroy Howard Roark. Toohey’s brand of elitism, which has been explained as unhealthy, versus Roark’s (and Rand’s) healthy elitism, makes him, in some critic’s eyes, an “apostle of collectivism.” While Toohey and Wynand share both the ego and the will to win, when they come into conflict over Roark’s work, Toohey speaks for the people in demonizing Roark’s designs. Too late, Wynand recognizes a cause worth fighting for but finds that the public, whose tastes he had once believed he could control, abandons him the first time he tries to use his own newspaper for a cause in which he actually believes. Too late, he recognizes that he has betrayed himself; closes down the newspaper; gives Roark his biggest commission yet, vowing never to see him again; and then disappears from the novel. Dominique Francon can also be seen as one of Roark’s foils. While she has the intellectual power to appreciate Roark and his work, she tries, at first, to destroy him before the mob does. Interestingly enough, she “marries her way up” to the romantic ideal of Howard Roark by starting cynically with Peter Keating, labeled a “second-rater,” then moving on to Gail Wynand, who betrayed all that he knew was right, and finally, after his great victory, becomes Mrs. Howard Roark. We last see her ascending a construction elevator to join him at the top of the skyscraper commissioned by Wynand. The aforementioned victory serves as the courtroom-drama climax of the novel. With no work coming his way, Roark is hungry, not for money, but for the sight of his work made manifest. At the same time, his foil Peter Keating, fearful always that his work, while neatly mimicking the fashionable taste of the time, will never be quite good enough, asks Roark for help. Keating has been assigned Cortlandt Homes, a public housing project at Francon’s firm where he works (and meets Dominique). Roark had already been working on the challenging task of designing an aesthetically appealing, but inexpensive public housing project. When Keating begs him for help, Roark agrees to let him use his plan on one proviso—that the project be built exactly

as designed. While Keating agrees to this, he has neither the strength nor the will to prevent the board, another collective, from making many ludicrous and expensive changes to Roark’s elegant design. When Roark sees the half-finished product, the betrayal is patent and he vows to take matters into his own hands. Ensuring that no one is hurt, Roark, with Dominique’s help, dynamites the project and is naturally brought up on charges. Roark acts as his own attorney at his trial. During his speech he argues that the rights of the individual to the fruits of his own mind are essential to American democracy and capitalism. A precursor to the later and more extended rhetorical appeal of John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, Roark’s defense, surprisingly, works. When he is acquitted, Dominique Francon’s faith in the individual is restored, while Gail Wynand’s faith in himself, based on cynical assumptions about the inevitable destruction of greatness, is destroyed. While both Dominique and Gail are proven wrong, Dominique is able to recover from that discovery while Wynand is not; thus they are foils. Roark’s appeal to the jury has been described as an argument for the “liberal ethic based on the principle, handed down from the Enlightenment, for the equal rights of all individuals to be left alone [with its] economic expression [as] laissez-faire capitalism.” Here Roark’s (and Rand’s) advocacy of minimal government and free enterprise can be seen as an expression of the “classical Americanism” of other writers, such as the novelist and critic Isabel Paterson of The God of the Machine, published in 1943. Critical response to The Fountainhead was even more polarized than response to Rand’s previous novels We the Living and Anthem. While We the Living, for instance, was occasionally dismissed as “good reading; bad pleading,” Anthem was far less argumentative in its approach and, as more of a parable, less subject to rhetorical or philosophical critique. The Fountainhead, on the other hand, struck a nerve with many who viewed collectivism, as practiced by the Soviets, for instance, as a noble cause, albeit one that had been betrayed. Capitalism, on the other hand, was often viewed as a more or less workable system that somehow transformed

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the private vice of selfishness into something that benefited society at large. Rand, as The Fountainhead made clear, condemned the group-think that touted the public good over all else as intrinsically evil, while she lauded selfi shness, as expressed in private enterprise, as intrinsically virtuous. In addition to the unorthodox stance, Rand’s stated position on other issues alienated her from both ends of the political spectrum: Her dismissal of religion as mysticism angered social political conservatives; her insistence that individuals must decide between right and wrong on the basis of objective standards alienated liberals who subscribed to relativism. This polarization would only increase as Rand carefully worked out a fully systematic epistemology through her next, and last, novel, Atlas Shrugged.

For Discussion or Writing 1. We fi rst meet Howard Roark, as stated previously, alone at the edge of a cliff. Consider the description that follows: “The lake lay below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in fl ight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of a brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone flowed, wet with sunrays.” Why is this an appropriate introduction to Roark as the self-determined architect of the modernist (versus traditional) style? 2. Find a literary definition of the world lyricism and consider the previous quote as an example of lyrical writing, as well as Rand’s intriguing use of paradox in this description. 3. Many critics read the first sexual encounter between Dominique and Roark as a rape scene. Do you agree? How would you defend Rand’s choice on artistic and/or psychological grounds? 4. Find reviews of Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, published in 1943, and compare its political philosophy to that expressed in Rand’s The Fountainhead. 5. Tragic heroes are those with noble qualities who suffer and fall, at least in part, through their own hamartia (from Greek, meaning “error” and in

the theological tradition “sin” and often discussed as a “tragic flaw”), combined with circumstances over which they have no control. Compare Gail Wynand of The Fountainhead to Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, in terms of their respective hamartia as it affects their failed attempt to achieve the American dream and keep the women they love.

Atlas Shrugged (1957) After 12 years of writing, Rand fi nished her 1,160page magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in 1957. In all likelihood because of the success of The Fountainhead, Rand’s novel was published only months after its completion in March 1957. Although Rand considered Atlas Shrugged her greatest artistic achievement and a major statement of her evolving epistemology, the intellectuals of her day tended to view the book with a good deal of hostility. Initial reviews tended toward the savage: Some labeled the novel “execrable claptrap” or “grotesque eccentricity.” One wit found it “longer than life and twice as preposterous.” In fact, the conservative critic Whittaker Chambers, quoted later in this article, stated that one could discern the command on every page, “To a gas chamber—go!” This is far more indicative of the extreme hostility the book evoked than any careful reading of its text. In fact, Galt’s speech, the climax of the novel, explicitly prohibits such horrors, stating, “So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate . . . do you hear me? No man may start—the use of physical force against others.” Fair or not, such reviews created initial sales so disappointing that Random House assumed the book would be a commercial failure. As the title suggests, the novel is based on the premise that Atlas, of Greek myth, fi nally abandons his task of holding up the entire weight of the world. In this case, Atlas is represented by the world’s self-made inventors, fi nanciers, scientists, industrialists, and artists, among others: the creative elite represented by Kira Argounova in We the Living, Equality 7-2521 in Anthem, and Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. This time, however,

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these people are recruited to go on strike by the most intellectually creative and independent of them all, John Galt. Among those who “shrug off” the weight of the world’s moochers by giving up power, position, and wealth for humbler jobs are Francisco d’Anconia, who destroys his own family’s copper mines while pretending to be no more than a worthless, globetrotting playboy; Quentin Daniels, who leaves a promising career as a scientist to become a night watchman; Calvin Atwood, who leaves behind his own Light and Power Company to become a shoemaker; Dr. Hugh Akston, teacher and mentor to Galt, who leaves his position as head of a university’s Philosophy Department to work in a roadside diner in Wyoming; Ragnar Danneskjöld, a philosopher turned pirate, sinking government relief ships; and the woman he fi nally marries, Kay Ludlow, a beautiful actress who goes on strike by retiring from the movies to protest the rapid decline of the world’s artistic standards. While Galt occupies the apex of the elite pyramid in this novel, he is one of the last characters we meet. Once again, as in The Fountainhead, Rand uses foils to great and pointed effect. Dagny Taggart and James Taggart, for instance, represent two contrasting positions in their family railroad; while James heads his family’s company, he is actually one of the “moochers” of the novel, who takes credit for the achievements of his sister, Dagny, who carries the true burden of responsibility for keeping the trains rolling and accident-free in a rapidly disintegrating society. Hank Rearden and his brother, Philip, on the other hand, represent true and false creativity. Hank, the inventor, lets himself be condemned as heartless because of his dedication to his work, while Philip condemns his older brother’s materialism while living off his money. While so many of their creative peers are mysteriously disappearing, people like Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden struggle to keep things working. Once Hank has invented his own metal, both stronger and lighter than steel, it becomes inevitable that he and Dagny meet. She needs his product and is the only one in her company brave enough to believe the evidence of her own mind and purchase the new material. When Rearden first sees Dagny, he feels

strong sexual desire. Taught to revile such base feelings, Rearden responds to his own desire for Dagny with self-loathing. Lillian and Dagny also serve as perfect foils. Lillian pours all her energy into being the wellsupported wife of a man she does not love, using his own guilt to “control” him passively. Alternately, Dagny is kinetic and creative, answering Rearden’s desire with her own. Dagny and Hank spend most of the novel trying to solve the mystery of the vanishing “movers and shakers” while struggling to survive in and support a more and more collectivized America, whose mystifying slogan has become “Who is John Galt?” While looking for Galt—the “destroyer” who is draining the world of its creative energy—Dagny is also seeking another man, an inventor who created a revolutionary motor she has found abandoned. Ironically, Dagny discovers that John Galt is the inventor of the mysterious machine when she crashlands her small plane in Galt’s Gulch. A utopia for independent thinkers Galt has established in the Colorado Rockies, Galt’s Gulch is where the strikers now live and thrive, out from under the world’s crushing burden. The use of foils also helps to propel the plot toward its climactic scenes: At the opposite end of the moral spectrum from Galt’s former philosophy professor and mentor, Dr. Hugh Akston, is Dr. Robert Stadler. Akston and Stadler had been colleagues at Patrick Henry University and competitors for the loyalty of their students Galt and his first two “followers,” Francisco d’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjöld. Stadler, the world’s greatest physicist, advocates that force is the only practical motivator of human behavior. When he becomes a stooge for the government by supporting the creation of their State Science Institute, Galt leaves his graduate studies in protest. Eventually, Stadler and another scientist, Floyd Ferris, compose two halves of an evil entity. Stadler provides the scientific understanding necessary for Ferris create deadly new weapons for the government. Fittingly, Stadler dies in an explosion his research helped to create. Ferris, who becomes top coordinator of the State Science Institute, creates

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the “Ferris Persuader,” a torture device later used on Galt in an attempt to force him to join the government and fix everything that is falling apart. But, his fellow strikers, Dagny Taggart among them, rescue Galt before he can acquiesce. As Dominique Francon does in The Fountainhead, Dagny Taggart “marries up,” so to speak; Francisco d’Anconia is her first love and the first to join John Galt’s strike, giving up Dagny and destroying his own copper mines to do so; after she loses Francisco, Dagny’s next lover is Hank Rearden; finally, she becomes John Galt’s mate, after serving for a time as his cook and maid. Eventually, the lights of New York City go out, indicating that Galt’s strike has succeeded; Galt decides that it is time for the strikers to reenter society and repair things, this time on their own terms. Despite its championing of free enterprise and disdainful portrait of a welfare state, Atlas Shrugged evoked strong hostility from some critics. Whittaker Chambers, one of America’s foremost conservatives at the time, stated in his National Review article published by William F. Buckley, Jr., that Rand was “advocating philosophical materialism, and, implicitly, the dictatorship of a technocratic elite.” Rand responded to this charge during a speech at Princeton University, “Conservatism: An Obituary,” where she attacked conservatives for their defense of tradition and conformity. They, in turn, were alienated by her defense of atheism and infidelity. Despite these heated exchanges, many political analysts now see a gradual incorporation of her defense of laissezfaire capitalism in current conservative arguments. Unfortunately, the novel is so intent on expounding upon its epistemology, even going so far as to name its chapters after Aristotelian principles, such as “A is A,” that it leaves itself open to charges of being rhetoric poorly disguised as a novel. Clearly, Galt’s speech, suspending as it does all characters, action, and story for its nearly 60-page length, is a departure from what many consider to be good storytelling. To be fair, however, other novels held in high esteem such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Richard Wright’s Native Son use a similar strategy. As has been pointed out previously, it is only logical that Rand abandoned fiction writing at this point

to devote her full energies to expanding and defending her new philosophy in such publications as the Objectivist Newsletter, the Objectivist, and, after her break with Nathaniel and Karen Branden, in the Ayn Rand Letter.

For Discussion or Writing 1. As Rand did in real life, her character Dagny Taggart seems to defend her affair with the married Hank Rearden as morally justified. Is her defense a good example of feminism? Why or why not? In traditional 19th- and 20th-century literature, for instance, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, women tend to pay the ultimate penalty for sexual malfeasance. Some women writers, on the other hand, such as Ayn Rand, make it a point to contradict that literary cliché. Try constructing a feminist or literary defense for such behavior. 2. Rand wrote in her 1957 introduction to Anthem that its fabled dystopia was not far off. Do you think Rand could apply that historical defense to Atlas Shrugged, as well? (For more information on this, see question 2 after the discussion of Anthem.)

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON RAND AND HER WORK 1. Consider Rand’s female characters in this and her other works, such as Karen Andre in The Night of January 16th, Kira Argounova in We the Living, Gaia (Liberty 5-3000) in Anthem, and Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. Are they feminists? Was Rand? Why or why not? 2. Research the concept of postapocalyptic literature and consider how it applies to Galt’s strikers and the consequences of their actions in Atlas Shrugged. Do they resemble the “new race” that traditionally emerges in these tales? Are their actions justified? How does this novel’s plot compare to that of other postapocalyptic stories such as the New Testament Book of Revelation, and more

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modern versions of this genre such as Larry Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream,” KURT VONNEGUT’s Cat’s Cradle, or Stephen King’s The Stand? 3. Rand’s 1946 introduction to Anthem warns that the distant future she wrote of is not all that far away. For instance, she cites the establishment of Councils of Vocations and Councils of Eugenics, as well as a World Council, as evidence that the world was, in 1946, well on its way to actualizing her fictional dystopia. She excoriates those around her, who, she claims, support “plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom. . . . They expect, when they fi nd themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps,” she continues, “to escape moral responsibility by wailing: ‘But I didn’t mean this!’ ” “Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name,” she concludes. Research the era in which Rand wrote this introduction to create a little historical-political context for yourself. Consider, on the basis of this research, to what extent Rand’s warning was justified WORKS CITED

AND

ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

“Ayn Rand.” In Ethics: Ready Reference Series. Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 1994. Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. Directed by Michael Paxton. Performed by Sharon Gless, Michael S. Berliner, Harry Binswanger, and Sylvia Bokor. 1998. DVD. Image, 1999. “The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism.” Available online. URL: http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer. Accessed January 27, 2007. “The Ayn Rand Society: A Professional Society Affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division.” Available online. URL: http://www. aynrandsociety.org/. Accessed February 14, 2007. Berger, Peter L. “Adam Smith Meets Nietzsche.” New York Times Book Review, 6 July 1986, p. 13. Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. New York: Anchor Books, 1987.

Branden, Nathaniel. Who Is Ayn Rand? An Analysis of the Novels of Ayn Rand. New York: Random House, 1962. “The Cato Institute.” Edited by Andrew Mast. Available online. URL: http://www.cato.org/special/threewomen/rand.html. Accessed February 14, 2007. Chambers, Whittaker. “Big Sister Is Watching You.” National Review, 20 December 1957, 594–596. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. The Ayn Rand Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. Gordon, Philip. “The Extroflective Hero: A Look at Ayn Rand.” Journal of Popular Culture, 10, no. 4 (Spring 1977): 701–710. Magill Literature Plus through Ebscohost. Available online. URL: http://web. ebscohost.com/ehost. Accessed January 2, 2007. Heller, Peter B. “Ayn Rand.” Cyclopedia of World Authors. 4th rev. ed. Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 2004. Hicks, Stephen R. “Ayn Rand.” World Philosophers and Their Works. Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 2000. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Directed by Christopher Menaul. Performed by Helen Mirren, Eric Stolz, Julie Delpy, and Peter Fonda. 1999. DVD. Showtime, 2001. Rand, Ayn. America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business. New York: Nathaniel Branden Institute, 1962. ———. For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. New York: Random House, 1961. ———. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Enlarged ed. Edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff. New York: New American Library, 1990. ———. The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature. Enlarged ed. New York: New American Library, 1975. Rand, Ayn, with Nathaniel Branden. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: New American Library, 1964. Rand, Ayn, with Nathaniel Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Robert Hessen. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966. “Solo: Sense of Life Objectivists.” Edited by Ross Elliot. Available online. URL: http://www.solopassion. com. Accessed February 14, 2007. Valliant, James. The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics. London: Durbin House. 2005.

Linda H. Straubel

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) Love begets love. This torment is my joy. (“The Motion”)

T

heodore Roethke, one of the most famous poets of mid-century America, was born in Saginaw, Michigan, on May 25, 1908, to Otto and Helen Roethke. Roethke’s father owned a greenhouse; the family’s business would figure largely in Roethke’s poetic development. The familial ties to flora extended back even further than Otto. Wilhelm Roethke, Otto’s father, had owned a flower shop in Berlin in the 1870s. Otto himself seemed to have been a lover of the outdoors and was known around Saginaw as an avid hunter. Theodore Roethke was a poet of prodigious power and vision, and he is especially known for his emphasis on rhythm and for his focus on the natural world and how human beings can or should seek a connection with it. He grew up in and around the greenhouses in which his father kept the plants on which the family livelihood depended. Roethke’s relationship with the natural world seems generally to have been more comfortable and soothing to him than his relationship with his father, which was complex. Otto Roethke did not seem to be a particularly demonstrative man, and young Theodore seems to have longed for his approval. Roethke’s biographer Allan Seager, citing an essay that Roethke wrote at college, states that Roethke seemed to have thought of his father “as a stern, short-tempered man whose love he doubted” (26). In 1921, Roethke entered high school, where he occasionally ran track and read voraciously. As

a high school student, he read widely, from Pater to Stevenson, and owned his own copies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He also wrote short pieces for the high school paper and was a good, if not outstanding student. Soon, however, Roethke’s domestic life began to unravel. In 1922, Otto and Charlie Roethke, Otto’s brother, had a falling out over how the family greenhouse business was being run, and the argument ultimately escalated to a point that, in October of that year, Charlie bought out Otto’s interest in the greenhouse. Charles Roethke, who by all accounts had never been the most emotionally stable individual, committed suicide in February 1923. At about this same time, Otto was diagnosed with cancer, and he died just two months after Charlie, in April 1923. Theodore apparently bore the latter death in silence, but, as one might expect, it had a profound effect on him, as confi rmed by the presence of his father in many of his poems, including one titled simply “Otto.” After high school, Roethke attended college at the University of Michigan from 1925 to 1929. There he came into his own as a scholar, graduating magna cum laude. The family pressured him to attend law school, but Roethke, dissatisfied with that career path, dropped out after only one semester. He decided, in lieu of law school, to attend graduate classes at the University of Michigan and, significantly, at Harvard University, where he

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encountered his fi rst true mentor, the poet Robert Hillyer. Because of fi nancial difficulties exacerbated by the Great Depression, Roethke was compelled to leave Harvard and taught for four years (1931–35) at Lafayette College, in Easton, Pennsylvania, where they still hold a biannual Roethke Humanities Festival in his honor. The next few years would play a significant role in Roethke’s development as a writer. In fall 1935, Roethke took his second full-time teaching job, at Michigan State College (later Michigan State University) in Lansing. There he formed a circle of friends and colleagues who would encourage and aid him in his development as an artist. At Michigan State College he met Stanley Kunitz, his friend and ardent supporter, and a poet of an already growing reputation in his own right. Most important, however, may be that he met Rolfe Humphries, who was a renowned critic and translator (known for his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid) as well as a poet. Humphries encouraged Roethke’s writing and also introduced him to Louise Bogan, the brilliant, though sometimes emotionally unstable, poet. While these people were to have a profound influence on Roethke, it was during this time that he began having bouts of depression severe enough for him to be hospitalized. These episodes, too, influenced him, and it is reported by more than one biographer that Roethke actually used the time during these periods to explore more deeply his inner self. During the decade of the 1930s Roethke began to garner a reputation as a poet. From 1936 to 1943, he taught at Penn State University, and it was during this time that his reputation as a poet began to flourish. In 1941, his fi rst volume of poems, Open House, was published and was favorably reviewed in some of the most prestigious publications of the day, including the New Yorker and the Kenyon Review. Before the book had even been published, Roethke had had individual poems appear in literary journals such as Poetry and the Sewanee Review. As a book of poetry, Open House contains more than the fruits of Roethke’s labors. It is also a record of Roethke’s early influences, with clear links evident between Roethke’s verse and the work of

contemporary poets like Kunitz and Bogan, but also earlier poets, such as John Donne. After the success of Open House, Roethke became widely recognized as a writer of merit. In 1943, he left Penn State and began teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. Each of Roethke’s destinations seems to have provided him with nurturing friends and colleagues. At Bennington, he befriended Leonie Adams and Kenneth Burke, two influential and talented writers. During his time at Bennington he wrote the poems that would compose his second volume, The Lost Son and Other Poems. This book contains the so-called greenhouse poems, a series of short lyrics that describe and reflect upon the youthful days Roethke spent among the greenhouses of his father’s business. The youthful feel of the book may have something to do with the poetic rhythms Roethke employed. According to his biographer Allan Seager, Roethke had borrowed from Seager a copy of the Rhymes of Mother Goose and apparently spent a great deal of time reading and memorizing many of the verses. Partly because of Roethke’s facility with rhythm and meter, The Lost Son garnered a great deal of praise from reviewers. Babette Deutsch, in the New York Herald-Tribune, remarked that Roethke’s lyrics “have a delicate music, and . . . a tenderness that is quite clean of sentimentality.” Roethke again changed teaching positions in August 1947, when he left Bennington to take an associate professor position at the University of Washington, where he founded one of the most prominent creative writing programs in the country. Conditions were not always wonderful for Roethke, however, despite his literary successes. In fall 1949 he was admitted to Fairfax Hospital and diagnosed with “hyperactivity and disorganized behavior,” probably a manic episode. Despite such setbacks, of which there were more than one, Roethke continued writing, and in 1951 Praise to the Lamb was published. The book contained longer poems than his previous volumes and is evidence that Roethke never ceased trying to expand his poetic repertoire, even in the face of substantial life changes. In January 1953 he married Beatrice

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O’Connell, a former student of his at Bennington, and in February 1954 Helen, his mother, died of a heart attack. Just a few short weeks after her death, Roethke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his volume The Waking: Poems 1933–1953. Having achieved a greater literary fame than he had had previously, Roethke applied for and won a Fulbright award in 1955. This award allowed him and Beatrice to travel throughout Europe and provided time in which to write. During the Fulbright year, he completed the manuscript for his next collection of poems, titled Words for the Wind, which was published in 1957. This volume garnered perhaps the greatest acclaim; for this work, Roethke was awarded the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, among others. He was a poet at the height of his power, and he was able to parlay his fame into reading tours in New York and Europe. He therefore taught rather intermittently at the University of Washington, considering his absences because of both illness and funded lecture and reading tours. Nonetheless, he made his mark there, as evidenced by the fact that each year the university continues to hold the Roethke Memorial Reading. He also did a great deal to publicize poetry as a literary art; therefore, his sudden death by heart attack in 1963 was a great loss to the field. His last poems, written in the fi nal year of his life, were published in The Far Field, which won the National Book Award in 1964. As a poet, Roethke left a lasting legacy, a body of work that exemplifies the power and vigor of American mid-century poetry. In particular, the attention he paid to rhythm and sound distinguishes him among his contemporaries, even those like James Wright, who also wrote more formal verse. The reasons his work continues to be popular are his dedication to the craft of poetry, to making poems sound wonderful, and the universal themes of his poetry. The open, honest, and lyrical way he writes of lost childhood, of people he knew, and of the importance of nature continues to fi re the imaginations of his readers. Roethke’s poems are a lasting record of a sensi-

tive, intelligent individual’s reaction to both the world without and the world within.

“The Adamant” (1941) This poem, from Roethke’s first collection, Open House, published in 1941, is a meditation on the nature of truth and the strength of an individual’s convictions. Adamant can have many meanings, most of them associated with hardness or impregnability. As an adjective, it usually means something similar to “unyielding” or “impenetrable.” An adamant is also a legendary stone, one said to be impenetrable and diamondlike in its hardness. The structure of this poem is important to its theme. Note that in each of the three stanzas, Roethke fi rst mentions something that cannot penetrate or alter the true nature of something else. In the fi rst stanza, he speaks of “the great sledge” (l. 2); in the second, of “the teeth of knitted gears,” (l. 5); in the third of “compression” (l. 9). These are all images of a kind of destructive external pressure being applied to something that does not yield. Because this poem is more abstract than many of Roethke’s other poems, it is difficult to understand what the “adamant” of the title might symbolize, but Roethke gives clues at various points. In the first stanza, he plainly says it is “truth,” noting, “Truth is never undone; / its shafts remain” (ll. 3–4). Later in the poem, Roethke also uses the phrases “true substance” (l. 7) and “a center so congealed” (l. 10). This seems to imply that the “truth,” whatever it might be, is impervious to external forces and so is what is able to endure in an often chaotic and unsure world. The “truth” Roethke mentions may also refer to that which resides in the human being, and perhaps more specifically, the artist. One of the difficulties facing a poet in Roethke’s time, and indeed, still today, was that many circumstances conspire against living the life of an artist, particularly a poet. It is demanding and rigorous work and offers no pay, unless one is very successful. Perhaps in this poem Roethke is offering each of us solace by telling us that the truth of our convictions, of the way we live

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our lives, cannot be altered or diminished by external circumstances.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What does living a life of “truth” mean to you? What does it seem to mean to the speaker in the poem? 2. What are some of the forces that might be symbolized by the sledgehammer and other images in the poem? What prevents us from living “truthful” lives? 3. The last two lines of the poem are “The tool can chip no flake; / The core lies sealed” (ll. 11–12). What do you suppose this means? Why did Roethke use the word sealed?

“The Light Comes Brighter” (1941) In this poem, from early in his career, Roethke uses a fairly regular iambic rhythm to meditate on the seasons and the changes they introduce. The poem opens with the speaker taking an early morning winter walk. It is a sharp and cold morning, he tells us, noting that “a walker at the river’s edge may hear / A cannon crack announce an early thaw” (ll. 3–4). Although it is winter, the “sun cuts deep” into a snowbank, reminding the speaker that as harsh as winter may feel, spring and its accompanying warmth are never far away. In fact, the speaker seems optimistic about the approaching spring and the consequent end of winter, especially since most of the images in the poem suggest life and vitality even in the midst of the winter landscape. At various points, the speaker tells us that “the cold roots stir below,” “buckled ice begins to shift,” and “Soon field and wood will wear an April look” (ll. 7, 12–13). The majority of the poem, in fact, seems to be simply a description of a winter landscape as seen through the eyes of someone who anticipates spring. However, as with most of Roethke’s work, there is something deeper at work, particularly in the last stanza, which reads: “And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene, / The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled, / Will turn its private substance into green, / And young

shoots spread upon our inner world” (ll. 17–20). Here, a deeper meaning and resonance are evident. The workings of nature, the speaker seems to be saying, are simultaneously hidden from us (the “hidden scene”) and, perhaps, impossibly beyond our ability to comprehend (the “young shoots” intruding upon our “inner world”). The adjective inner implies that our world, the small world of our sensory experience and memory, is dwarfed by the larger, more complex, and hidden machinations of nature. Note, too, Roethke’s implication that even nature itself is possessed of intelligence and will (the “leafy mind” and “private substance”).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the poem aloud to get a sense of how it sounds. What might the rhythm and meter have to do with the poem’s subject matter? 2. Compare the poem to Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.” In what ways do both poets use rhythm to underscore the main theme of the poem? Do the poems “sound” different when read aloud? If so, why might this be the case? 3. Compare this poem to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” How do both poets discuss the cycle of the seasons? How do their attitudes differ toward nature?

“Big Wind” (1948) This poem, from Roethke’s second collection, The Lost Son and Other Poems, published in 1948, describes the effects of a severe rainstorm on the greenhouses that Roethke’s family owned. The poem, however, is not merely a description of a difficult night in the life of a greenhouse owner but an engaging meditation on both the power of nature and the lengths to which humans will go to claim their part of it. The opening lines of the poem detail the damage the storm has done. The lines “Where were the greenhouses going, / Lunging into the lashing / Wind driving water / So far down the river” (ll. 1–4) indicate that many of the greenhouses have been washed away by the

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now-flooded river. The majority of the rest of the poem details the efforts of the speaker and his family to save both the “rose-house” (the greenhouse containing roses) and the roses growing in it. During the middle part of the poem, the speaker figures the greenhouse as if it is a ship being tossed about on the sea, noting that “she rode it out / That old rose-house / She hove into the teeth of it” (ll. 21–23). This image is taken up again when Roethke concludes the poem with the night’s storm abating and morning approaching, telling us the greenhouse “sailed until the calm morning / Carrying her full cargo of roses” (ll. 32–33). While the image of the greenhouse as a cargo ship tossed upon a stormy sea might seem to be just an interesting metaphor, the implications of such an image are far-reaching. The family, whose business is cultivating plants, in effect ordering and controlling nature, is suddenly at the mercy of the storm, another aspect of nature. What Roethke offers us in this poem is a meditation on the folly of human beings’ thinking that they are ultimately in control of their environment, even, perhaps especially, if they are people who spend their lives growing, pruning, and cultivating nature. The poem reminds us that nature, whether benign or angry, always has the fi nal say.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does Roethke use images of water in this poem? Is there anything ironic about the way he describes water? 2. Examine the middle of the poem, where the family is working to save the roses. How do they feel about their livelihood? Is it more than a simple vocation? 3. First read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, focusing on what Dillard says about nature. Next, compare Roethke’s vision of nature with Dillard’s. How do the two describe nature? How do they both reflect their vision of nature in their writing style? With both authors in mind, write a well-developed essay that explores the relationship between art and nature and the role of the poet’s imagination in inducing us to examine/experience nature.

“Cuttings”/“Cuttings (later)” (1948) This pair of poems is also from The Lost Son and Other Poems. They are the opening poems of the volume and are good examples of both the sharp attention Roethke paid to the details of the natural world and the way he reflects upon how that natural world impacts the viewer. The fi rst poem, “Cuttings,” is a fairly straightforward description of floral cuttings, in a vase or some type of container, drooping over the “sugary loam” of earth (l. 1). Note the speaker’s fascination with the plant’s workings, as if the poem is a kind of affi rmation of life even though the cuttings “droop” and “stemfur dries” (ll. 1, 2). Despite these signs of decay, the speaker notes that “the delicate slips keep coaxing up water” (l. 3) and that “the small cells bulge” (l. 4). The plant thus still goes about the business of living even while it is dying. The poem closes with another image of life, the “nub of growth” (l. 5), probably a nascent bud, pushing through to nudge “a sand crumb loose” and poking its “pale tendrilous horn” through a sheath (ll. 7–8). This poem, if it stood alone, would principally be a short meditation on the energy and growth of nature in spite of impending death and decay. When coupled with “Cuttings (later),” however, it becomes something more. In the second of the paired poems, the speaker takes a more philosophical tone, asking, “What saint strained so much, / Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?” (ll. 3–4). This philosophical stance leads the speaker to reflect on his relationship with the natural world: “I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, / In my veins, in my bones I feel it,—” (ll. 5–6). Here, it is almost as if he projects himself into the process that the plant undergoes in order to draw water up into itself, implying that there is a link, whether we recognize it or not, between humans and the rest of the natural world they inhabit. At the poem’s conclusion, the speaker further aligns himself with the plant, noting, “When sprouts break out, / Slippery as fish, / I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.” (ll. 9–11) The speaker ultimately both reminds us of the importance of our links with the natural world and demonstrates that that world carries the possibility of renewal. Note that he leans

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to “beginnings” rather than focusing on the imminent death of the cuttings, reminding us, perhaps, that nature, even in the midst of death, still contains life and energy.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare the observer in this poem with the observer in James Wright’s poem “Fear Is What Quickens Me.” Wright, who was a student of Roethke’s at the University of Washington, also is a keen observer of nature, but his nature poems offer a different perspective than do Roethke’s. Compare the speakers in each poem. Where and how do they differ in their attitudes about what they see and feel? 2. What are the effects of the hyphenated words and phrases in the fi rst poem? Why do you suppose Roethke hyphenated those words? How do those words/phrases affect the rhythm of the poem? 3. Identify an experience or two in your own life when you felt a connection or a particularly powerful emotional response to some aspect of the natural world. What feelings did this experience evoke, and how do they compare to what Roethke’s attitude seems to be about nature?

“My Papa’s Waltz” (1948) As John J. McKenna demonstrates in his spring 1998 ANQ article, “Roethke’s Revisions and the Tone of ‘My Papa’s Waltz,’ ” this early poem, despite its brevity and straightforwardness, was deliberately crafted by Roethke to create a sense of ambiguity, resulting in a poem that can be read as both a positive and a negative recollection of a father-son relationship. From one perspective, the father and son, rabble-rousers, enact a familiar, at times comic ritual in which they express affection for each other. From another perspective, a drunken father engages in a form of roughhousing with his son that is abusive. For McKenna, the ambiguity is achieved through word choices that create both a playful and a terrifying tone. Yet, whether one examines the poem for word choices

or considers the radical disjunction that occurs between the graphic violence depicted in the poem and the poem’s lilting rhyme scheme, there is no doubt that reading the poem elicits a range of complex emotions we might associate with a grown man’s thinking about the relationship, fraught with the complications and physical altercations, he shared with his father. His palm caked with dirt, the father appears as a laborer, a powerful human being toughened by toil whose death now hangs on his son as the son, then a boy, hung unto his father’s shirt as they brawled. A poem of contrasts, “My Papa’s Waltz” juxtaposes the innocence of a child with the drunken breath of a violent man, leaving us to weigh, as does the speaker, what can be made of this intimate relationship fi lled with emotions at odds with themselves.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the rhyme and meter of “My Papa’s Waltz.” Normally, we would associate such a rhyme scheme and such meter with a child’s nursery rhyme. What is the effect of the rhyme and rhythm when coupled with the poem’s subject matter? How does the speaker seem to feel about his father, and why is he using these particular rhythms and rhymes to tell us his story? Is the poem’s rhythm indicative of an actual childhood song that is in three-quarter time such as “Hickory, Dickory, Dock”? 2. Thinking of the details that characterize the father in this poem, write an essay on the father’s actions. As you write, consider how Roethke constructs the father through connotative word choices.

“Root Cellar” (1948) The subject of this poem, as the title suggests, is a root cellar, a type of cellar that is partially or even wholly underground and covered with earth. A root cellar is typically a place where root crops and even other kinds of vegetables are stored. This poem is an homage, a tribute to something the poet thinks is important. At fi rst glance, a dank

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and dirty root cellar does not seem particularly inspiring or noteworthy, but part of the poem’s point is that we often dismiss as unimportant those things that can help us more deeply understand both ourselves and the world in which we live. For Roethke, one of these is a root cellar, a place where “nothing would sleep” (l. 1). By telling us that nothing would sleep in the cellar, Roethke implies that even in this place that is “dank as a ditch” (l. 1) there is life. And indeed, in the very next lines, the speaker notes that “bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark, / Shoots dangled and drooped” (ll. 2–3). The way that Roethke imbues seemingly inanimate things with life demonstrates how even things that we would not normally think of as alive strive to continue to exist. Note that the bulbs break out of their boxes, as if the boxes were a kind of prison, and “hunt,” as if alive, for “chinks” where they can put down roots. For Roethke, the cellar represents a fertile and nurturing place, a place that is “silo-rich” (l. 8) and full of “leaf-mold” and “manure” (l. 9), two substances that aid plants in their growth. The poem’s conclusion affi rms this, particularly the lines where the speaker notes that “nothing would give up life: / Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath” (ll. 10–11). Such observations serve to underline the poet’s main point, that even those elements of our environment that we tend to dismiss or overlook still, in some way, live. Even though we may recognize that dirt plays a vital role in the propagation of plants, Roethke seems to be asking, Do we also recognize that it, too, breathes and perhaps yearns for life in the way that any other organism might?

For Discussion or Writing 1. This poem encourages us to pay closer attention to our surroundings. Identify an object that you pass by or see every day and take for granted, then do what Roethke does in this poem. Meditate on that object, describe it, and think about the ways in which it might be more significant than you fi rst thought. 2. Why does the root cellar, such a dark and cramped place, seem to be such an endearing place for the speaker?

“The Lost Son” (1948) “The Lost Son” is a longer, meditative poem in five sections. Each section is set in a different time and place, and most critics agree that the occasion that triggered this poem was the death of Roethke’s father, Otto, in 1923, when Roethke was only 14 years old. The poem is not only a meditation on death but also a reflection on childhood and the ways in which humans make their way through the world despite tragic losses. The fi rst section, “The Flight,” is set in a cemetery; the speaker tells us, “At Woodlawn I heard the dead cry,” and he was “lulled by the slamming of iron” (ll. 1–2). The speaker is understandably disoriented after the death of a loved one and later in the section is sitting in an “empty house” asking “which is the way I take” (l. 25). These questions trigger a remembrance of earlier childhood and of a time when the speaker ran through fields to a river bog. The second section, “The Pit,” is a short section containing a series of questions such as “Where do the roots go?” and “Who put the moss there?” Such questions could be interpreted to indicate that the young speaker is still looking at the forest floor and being reminded of the grave he saw in the fi rst section. The third section, “The Gibber,” is very loosely held together and is the section most difficult to read. This befits the title of the section, since gibber means “to talk nonsense.” It is almost as if the speaker, still suffering from the loss of his father, has lost his way and can no longer make sense of his world. This section alternates fairly concrete imagery and narrative (“What gliding shape / Beckoning through halls, / Stood poised on the stair, / Fell dreamily down?”) with somewhat more disjointed images and questions (“My veins are running nowhere. Do the bones cast out their fi re?”). The fourth section, “The Return,” fi nds the speaker returning in time to the greenhouse he haunted as a boy. In this section, the speaker begins to fi nd a peace within, and again, the natural world exhibits redemptive qualities, especially when the speaker notices that “the roses kept breathing in the dark.” This feeling of hope or recovery is also present in the last section, titled “ ‘It was beginning winter.’ ” This section begins with a description of winter, of “blue snow”

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on the ground and the “bones of weeds” “swinging in the wind.” Since winter is traditionally the season of death, one might assume that the speaker is still focusing on the loss of this father, but by the end of the section, the speaker mentions “clear air,” “light,” and the word alive, signaling that perhaps he has entered the realm of the living again. The fi nal lines of the poem would seem to bear this out. After his journey through death, depression, and loneliness, the speaker concludes the poem with this: “A lively understandable spirit / Once entertained you. / It will come again. / Be still. / Wait.” The speaker, therefore, has gone from a place of great despair and loss to a place of hope. The closing lines indicate that if one can endure difficult times, one cultivates the patience needed to anticipate better days.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the fourth section carefully. How does Roethke use images to propel the reader from despair to hope? 2. What is the speaker’s attitude about death in each section? How does Roethke indicate the speaker’s changing attitude? 3. Make a list of all of the references to animals in the poem. Why would Roethke use so many images of animals?

“Weed Puller” (1948) This poem, another one from The Lost Son, is told from the point of view of a boy (probably Roethke as a child) who is weeding “under the concrete benches,” which are probably in a formal garden. The poem essentially narrates an individual’s struggle against the seemingly unstoppable forces of nature. The young boy in the poem sees the weeds against which he pits himself as somehow threatening. The monkey tails are “lewd,” the “fern shapes” are “tough,” and all of the weeds are evidence of a kind of “perverse life.” The language, while it is highly charged, is understandable in the context of the gardener’s unending battle against the elements. Cultivated gardens represent the

human propensity to impose order upon nature, and it is therefore understandable, perhaps even expected, that any gardener, even a boy, would fi nd weeds a nuisance. Once again, however, the speaker’s perceptions about nature expand and deepen the more he spends in the natural realm. In the second half of the poem, the speaker makes a clear distinction between the weeds he is trying to eliminate and the more aesthetically pleasing parts of the garden. He mentions the “indignity” of having to pull weeds while “Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses” bloom above him, but he goes even further at the close of the poem. After contemplating the beauty of the blooming flowers, the speaker comments on the indignity of his job, telling us that he is “Crawling on all fours, / Alive, in a slippery grave.” The arresting fi nal image of a grave is particularly interesting, especially after having read poems such as “Root Cellar,” where Roethke appears to be making an argument about how there is life even in dank, dark places. In this poem, however, that feeling is reversed and the speaker complains of feeling buried alive. This poem contains a darker image of nature, perhaps, but also one with which Roethke would have been familiar. In other poems, he has explored how nature symbolizes the yin and yang of life and death, and the fact that he ends this particular poem with the image of a grave might, in Roethke’s case, symbolize the complex relationship between life and death rather than simply the cessation of all life. The weeds, after all, keep returning, no matter how many times they are pulled.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In the middle of the poem, the speaker calls the weeds “perverse life.” What does this term imply? 2. Does the speaker feel that what he is doing has any value? Why or why not?

“The Waking” (1953) This poem, one of Roethke’s greatest, deals with the confl ict between thinking and feeling, the

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way we abstract the world in an effort to make sense out of it versus the way we respond to the world as it actually presents itself. Thus, the poem is fi lled with the sort of paradoxes our reasoning minds yearn to resolve but continue to fi nd irresolvable: the paradox of waking to sleep, living to die, shaking to keep steady, or falling away to stay near. Such confl icts occur throughout human history and, at least for the speaker of this poem, are interconnected with our fascination with reason, the Enlightenment principle for understanding the world and making it a better place to inhabit. While we use reason to sort out our lives, to make sense of them and fi nd meaning and purpose, we also encounter many things that lie beyond reason’s hold. Literally, we and the speaker of the poem desire to understand but ultimately confront things outside our mind’s ability to comprehend. In this sense, the poem is a deeply metaphysical poem concerned with how we know things, how we come to understand things, and how we may be part of something greater than we can think or articulate. The poem is a variation of a villanelle, a strict form in which lines or phrases are repeated at the end of stanzas as a kind of refrain. The poem contrasts waking and sleeping, metaphors for not only the pattern we follow day to day, but also the pattern of our lives. As in the opening words of the requiem, the mass for the dead, “in the midst of life we are in death”: Our lives are transient; no matter how hard we seek to create a better world, to reason out the purpose of our lives, and to sustain human life, we die. To see this process as “waking” is to entertain paradox, which for the speaker of the poem means confronting death.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “The Waking” and “Four for John Davies” are both famous Roethke poems in the form of villanelles, six-stanza poems built on two rhymes, with two lines repeated alternately as the fi nal lines of each of the fi rst five stanzas and used together in the fi nal stanza, which has four lines. First, mark the repeated lines in both poems. After doing so, consider why Roethke

chose to highlight these sets of lines in the two poems. Other than their form, do the poems share any thematic concerns? With these questions in mind, write a well-developed essay that compares the two villanelles, seeking to explain why Roethke may have chosen identical forms for two different poems. 2. Read Roethke’s “In Evening Air,” another poem in which the poet speaks of the desire to wake. After considering how Roethke describes waking in both “In Evening Air” and “The Waking,” write a well-developed essay that contrasts the two and is focused on the image of waking.

“Elegy” (1958) Roethke wrote this poem later in his career; it appears in The Far Field, a posthumous volume published in 1964 that was awarded the National Book Award for that year. On the whole, The Far Field is more deeply meditative than some of Roethke’s other collections, and the subject matter, along with the poet’s voice, bears this out. This poem, for instance, is indeed an elegy, a type of poem written to commemorate the death of a person, usually but not always, someone the poet knew personally. Unlike many elegies, however, this one does not idealize the dead person, the speaker’s aunt Tilly, but rather describes her in plain, simple language that is often anything but flattering. The poem opens, for example, by telling us that Aunt Tilly’s face was like “a rain beaten stone on the day she rolled off / With the dark hearse” (ll. 1–2). Note, too, the line break and the way it seems to accentuate the casual nature of the death. If we stop reading at line 1 it seems as if Aunt Tilly simply rolled out of this life nonchalantly. Despite this unfl inching, almost casual language, however, Aunt Tilly is recalled to the speaker’s mind with great affection, such as when he remembers how she “sat with the dead . . . fed and tended the infi rm” and “faced up to the worst” (ll. 8–9, 11). For all of the reminiscences about his aunt, however, the speaker does not avoid the difficult facts of her death, telling us that “she died

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in agony, / Her tongue, at the last, thick, black as an ox’s” (ll. 16–17). This unfl inching portrait of a loved one’s death may be shocking to us, but the speaker clearly wants us to know the truth about both Aunt Tilly’s life and her death. It is in this way that he has chosen to honor her. The affectionate portrait continues in the poem’s conclusion, where the speaker calls his aunt the “terror of cops, bill collectors and betrayers of the poor” (l. 18) and pictures her “in some celestial supermarket, / Moving serenely among the leeks and cabbages” (ll. 19–20). The poem thus presents a complex portrait of a beloved member of the speaker’s family, a portrait that captures the grace and generosity of Aunt Tilly as well as the almost casual facts of her death.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Reflect upon your own experiences with death. Have you lost someone close to you? If so, how did your feelings compare to the speaker’s feelings in “Elegy”? What was different/similar about the way you felt? 2. Why does Roethke end the poem with Aunt Tilly’s staring down the butcher? What is he trying to tell us about her personality? What is Aunt Tilly’s personality? Describe it using evidence from the poem. 3. Why do we tend to idealize someone when he or she dies? What is Roethke trying to tell us with the way he deliberately avoids idealizing Aunt Tilly? 4. Compare Roethke’s poem with Thomas Gunn’s “The Beautician,” from his 1992 book entitled The Man with Night Sweats. The book includes many poems set in the context of AIDS-plagued San Francisco in the 1980s. Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, England, in 1929 and lived most of his adult life in San Francisco, where he died in his home in 2004. With both poets’ lives in mind, how do these two poems comment on the nature of loss? What does each have to say about memory and idealization of those who have died? How do both poems complement and diverge from each other?

“Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze” (1958) This is another poem from The Lost Son and Other Poems; it concerns three elderly women who used to work at the Roethke greenhouse. Like “Elegy,” this poem is a fond remembrance of people who meant a great deal to the speaker, but it is also a celebration of work. These “three ancient ladies” (l. 1) were responsible for tying drooping plants upright and generally for the well-being of “carnations” and “red chrysanthemums” (ll. 8, 9), among other plants. Roethke remembers them as active and vital to the operations of the greenhouse despite their age; verbs and adjectives he uses to describe their actions are sprinkled, shook, flew, and twinkling, among others. Roethke’s choice of these active words demonstrates the life inherent even in the aged women whose responsibility it is to keep “creation at ease.” The poem, though, goes even further: In its latter half, the three “fraus” are presented to us as not merely energetic, conscientious employees but as almost supernatural guardians of a world perhaps even beyond the greenhouse. The speaker notes that the women “flew along rows” “like witches” (l. 19) and that they “sewed up the air with a stem” (l. 22) and even “trellised the sun; they plotted for more than themselves” (l. 25). These women are thus not merely women but almost sacred guardians of nature. This idea is borne out in the fact that they can sew up the air and trellis the Sun, two abilities that are traditionally considered to be beyond human control. By presenting them to us as personages who have almost supernatural abilities, Roethke sets up the reader for the fi nal moving image, for these women, powerful and perhaps supernatural as they are, still inhabit a place in the speaker’s memory and thus retain their power even though they are deceased. The speaker in fact claims that when he is “alone and cold in [his] bed” (l. 30) they “hover over [him]” (l. 31), as if they are indeed spirits. The poem concludes as the speaker tells us that “their snuff-laden breath [blows] lightly over me in my fi rst sleep” (l. 35). The speaker’s remembrance of these women, therefore, is a testament to the

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enduring nature of the women and hence their work. The speaker recalls not only the physical work they did in and around the greenhouse but the women themselves, thus linking the importance of physical labor, especially labor spent in cultivating plants, with the enduring nature of both memory and the human spirit.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Determine the speaker’s view of labor by reading the poem carefully, then compare it to your own. What argument does the poem make about the value of work, and how does your own view of work compare with the speaker’s? 2. Why, if this is a fond remembrance of the speaker, does he describe the fraus as “witches” and “leathery crones”? What are the different connotations of the word crone? 3. What role does memory play in the poem? Compare the speaker’s memories with a fond memory of your own. What function does memory play in our lives?

“The Far Field” (1964) This poem is another extended meditation, written in four separate sections, and is the title poem of the last and posthumously published collection of poems by Roethke. It is the story of a long and complex life’s journey, and it shows a gifted poet at the height of his powers. We are told that the poem is about journeys in the fi rst line: “I dream of journeys repeatedly” (l. 1). Just what those journeys are, we are left to interpret, but the concluding lines of the fi rst section probably refer to the progression from old age to death since we are provided with an image of a stalled car “churning in a snowdrift / Until the headlights darken” (ll. 11–12). The second section of the poem is set in the speaker’s youth, and the majority of images in this section are from the fields the speaker haunted as a boy. He speaks of the “nesting place of the field mouse” and of “the shrunken face of a dead rat.” This section is not, however, a mere litany of images. We are given important information about the

early part of the speaker’s life journey, particularly when he claims that it was by closely observing the natural world that “one learned of the eternal” and further that he “learned not to fear infi nity.” The transformations that he observed in the field, the life and also the death, taught him that the process of living was inevitably bound up with the process of dying. In the third section, the speaker speaks of growing older, noting that he feels “a weightless change, a moving forward” as if he is recognizing the passage of time. The chief metaphor in this section is a river, which symbolizes the inevitable passing of time. At the end of this section, Roethke again returns to the idea of not fearing death. The speaker at one point says, “I am renewed by death” and takes comfort in the fact that what he loves “is near at hand/Always, in earth and air.” The fourth and fi nal section extends and complicates the river/water metaphor. The speaker speaks of the sea as perhaps the fi nal destination, noting, “The lost self changes, / Turning toward the sea,” and there is an impression that the speaker is in the very last stages of his life and is thinking about what lies beyond. This is supported by the poem’s conclusion, when the speaker tells us, “All fi nite things reveal infi nitude” and when he ends with another image of water: “Silence of water above a sunken tree: / The pure serene of memory in one man,— / A ripple widening from a single stone / Winding around the waters of the world.” Roethke’s use of the image of a stone being thrown into water and the ripples that emanate from it symbolizes both a single human life and that life’s connectedness to all that it contacts. It is Roethke’s fi nal statement on the importance of recognizing our place within the fabric of existence.

For Discussion or Writing 1. There are many images of water in this poem, particularly in its latter half. Make a list of all of the different things that water can symbolize. Which ones do you think were utmost in Roethke’s mind when he was writing this poem and why? 2. Reflect upon your own life’s journey. What do you feel about your life so far, and what do you

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feel when you think about your own future? How does the speaker in the poem seem to feel about his own journey? 3. Examine the animal imagery in the second section. Many of the images are of destruction or decay. What does the speaker seem to have learned from these images? How does he apply those lessons later in the poem?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ROETHKE AND HIS WORK 1. A critic once referred to Roethke’s style as “Midwestern Romanticism.” Compare Roethke’s poem “Night Journey” to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” How might the critic’s assessment be accurate? What is the “romantic” view of nature? 2. Compare Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane” with Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard.” What are the attitudes of each speaker regarding death? Why might their attitudes differ given the subject matter of each poem? With these questions in mind, write a well-developed essay that deals with the nature of morality in the two poems. 3. Look at Roethke’s poem “The Geranium.” How does this poem differ from other poems he has written about nature? How do the closing lines differ in tone from the rest of the poem? 4. In “Journey into the Interior,” how does Roethke use nature to describe the process of self-discovery? Why would he use such concrete imagery in an essentially “psychological” poem? 5. In his poem “The Waking,” Roethke repeats the line “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.” What does that line mean to you? And how does that line fit with the overall theme of the poem? 6. Compare Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Problem” with Roethke’s “In a Dark Time.” How does each poet discuss things that are larger than they are? How does each poet feel about God?

7. Read both Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman” and J. V. Cunningham’s “The Aged Lover Discourses in the Flat Style,” thinking about the way each describes both physical and spiritual love. Do these poems offer valuable insights into loving, teaching us about the complicated dance of closeness and estrangement we call “love”? Do these poems objectify women? With these questions in mind, write a well-developed essay on the representation of women in both poems. WORKS CITED

AND

A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

“The Academy of American Poets—Theodore Roethke.” www.poets.org. Available online. URL: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/13. Accessed November 26, 2006. Balakian, Peter. Theodore Roethke’s Far Fields: The Evolution of His Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Beaman, Darlene. “Roethke’s Travels: An Overview of His Poetry.” Green River Review 14, no. 2 (1983): 79–90. Blessing, Richard. “The Shaking That Steadies: Theodore Roethke’s ‘The Waking.’ ” Ball State University Forum 12, no. 4 (1971): 17–19. Bogen, Don. “From Open House to the Greenhouse: Theodore Roethke’s Poetic Breakthrough.” ELH 47, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 399–418. ———. Theodore Roethke and the Writing Process. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. Bowers, Neal. “Roethke’s ‘The Waking.’ ” Explicator 40, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 51–53. Boyd, John. “Texture and Form in Theodore Roethke’s Greenhouse Poems.” Modern Language Quarterly 32 (1971): 409–424. Ernst, Elissa. “The Father-Son Relationship in ‘My Papa’s Waltz.’ ” Notes on Contemporary Literature 29, no. 3 (May 1999): 7–8. Fong, Bobby. “Roethke’s ‘My Papa’s Waltz.’ ” College Literature 17, no. 1 (1990): 79–82. Heringman, Bernard. “Roethke’s Poetry: The Forms of Meaning.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 16 (1974): 567–583.

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Kalaidjian, Walter B. Understanding Theodore Roethke. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. La Belle, Jenijoy. The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1976. ———. “Martyr to a Motion Not His Own: Theodore Roethke’s Love Poems.” Ball State University Forum 16, no. 2 (1975): 71–75. Lee, Charlotte I. “Roethke Writes about Women.” Literature in Performance: A Journal of Literary and Performing Art 1, no. 1 (1980): 23–32. Lewandowska, M. L. “The Words of Their Roaring: Roethke’s Use of the Psalms of David.” In The David Myth in Western Literature, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, 156–167. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1980. McClatchy, J. D. “Sweating Light from a Stone: Identifying Theodore Roethke.” Modern Poetry Studies 3 (1972): 1–24. McKenna, John J. “Roethke’s Revisions and the Tone of ‘My Papa’s Waltz.’” ANQ 11, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 34–38. Meyers, Jeffrey. “The Background of Theodore Roethke’s ‘Elegy for Jane,’ ” Resources for American Literary Study 15, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 138–144. O’Sullivan, Michael. “ ‘Bare Life’ and the Garden Politics of Roethke and Heaney.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 38, no. 4 (December 2005): 17–34. Parini, Jay. “Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic.” Texas Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1978): 99–114.

Ramsey, Jarold. “Roethke in the Greenhouse.” Western Humanities Review 26 (1972): 35–47. Rivinus, Timothy. “Waltzing with Papa, Dancing with the Bears: Illness, Alcoholism and Creative Rebirth in Theodore Roethke’s Poetry.” In Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics, edited by Sue Vice, Matthew Campbell, and Tim Armstrong, 40–57. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academy, 1994. Seager, Allan. The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Smith, R. T. “Critical Introduction to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke (1909–1963).” Green River Review 14, no. 2 (1983): 11–16. Spanier, Sandra Whipple. “The Unity of the Greenhouse Sequence: Roethke’s Portrait of the Artist.” Concerning Poetry 12, no. 1 (1979): 53–60. Stout, Janis P. “Theodore Roethke and the Journey of the Solitary Self.” Interpretations 16 (1985): 86–93. Sullivan, Rosemary. Theodore Roethke: The Garden Master. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976. “Theodore Roethke.” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/ maps/poets/m_r/roethke/roethke.htm. Accessed November 26, 2006. Trudayaraj, A. Noel Joseph. “Theodore Roethke’s ‘Elegy for Jane’: An Analysis.” Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages Bulletin 17, no. 1 (1981): 25–33.

Gary Ettari

Philip Roth (1933–

)

And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people . . . ? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. (American Pastoral 35)

P

hilip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, on March 19, 1933. The second of Bess and Herman Roth’s two sons, Roth was born into an ethnic interwar neighborhood. His immigrant parents raised Philip and his brother in a predominantly Jewish, lower-middle-class Newark neighborhood called Weequahic. Herman Roth, like the protagonist’s father in Roth’s well-known novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), was a traveling insurance salesman, who attempted to sell umbrella policies to poor families during the darkest days of the depression. In his nonfiction work Patrimony (1991), Roth relates how stressful this job was for his father and details the effects it had on his own childhood. In particular, the failure of his father’s career to get past the anti-Semitic gatekeepers of the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment that ran the insurance company made a deep impression on young Roth. Bess, a homemaker, was her youngest son’s greatest fan and, Roth has insisted, does not resemble any of the Jewish maternal figures he has featured in a number of his works. The Newark of Roth’s childhood, Weequahic in particular, is immortalized in countless Roth novels. Newark is to Roth’s oeuvre what the fictional Yoknapatawpha County was to that of WILLIAM FAULKNER , a combined muse and amanuensis through which the author could weave his startling insights into American culture. In works from his

controversial Portnoy’s Complaint to American Pastoral (1997), the fi rst novel in his so-called American trilogy, Roth portrays the Newark of his youth in painstaking detail. Often seen through a veil of nostalgia, the New Jersey of Roth’s youth is portrayed with nuance and intricacy. At times, he represents Newark as an American utopia, far from the racial and economic ills that would swallow the city during the 1960s and 1970s. At other moments in Roth’s work, such as The Plot against America (2004), Newark becomes the subject of a prolonged meditation on what he views as the decline of the American city during the 20th century. Like many of the upwardly mobile characters in Roth’s works, especially in Goodbye, Columbus (1959), the members of the community he grew up in were caught between their desire to retain a separate, distinct culture and the socioeconomic pressure to assimilate into the secular world. The confl icts that arise between these tendencies— the preservation of Jewish cultural identity and the seductive pull of a homogenizing America— are central to Roth’s work. In The Ghost Writer (1979), Roth emphasizes how this widespread Jewish-American dilemma impacts its artists and writers, who often feel an excessive pressure to act as representatives of their people. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s frequent literary alter ego, makes his fi rst appearance in this work. As Roth himself had, Zuckerman has his

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fi rst taste of commercial and critical success undermined by the rabid criticism he receives from members of the Jewish community when he publishes material that fails to cast the most flattering light on Jews. A cosmopolitan sophisticate in New York City, Zuckerman receives letters from his parents begging him to refrain from depicting the darker depths of Jewish life. The Human Stain (2000), too, contrasts “the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we with its insidious E pluribus unum . . . [with] the raw I with all its agility” (108). Additionally, Roth is deeply invested in exploring what it means to be an American in the 20th century. One of his most recent novels, The Plot against America (2004), chronicles the childhood experiences of a fictional “Philip Roth” who is frequently caught between his family’s zeal for America, with its espousal of democracy, and the latent anti-Semitism he encounters. Roth has been exploring such themes since a very young age. After graduating from high school, the precocious Roth moved to New Brunswick to study at Rutgers, then on to Bucknell University in rural Pennsylvania. Receiving his B.A. there, he then moved to Chicago to pursue graduate studies in English literature. There Roth obtained his fi rst teaching position and befriended his fellow JewishAmerican novelist and mentor, SAUL BELLOW; Roth also met his fi rst wife, a blond midwesterner named Mary Ann Martinson. Roth’s marriage to Martinson—a perfect example of the unattainable ideal he celebrated and stereotyped throughout his career—was fraught with trouble, leading to their separation in 1963. Martinson later died in a car crash in 1968, the year before Portnoy’s Complaint was published. As he later admitted in his experimental memoir, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), Roth based the self-destructive female protagonist of his third novel, When She Was Good (1967), on his former wife—one of his few novels that do not take place in Newark. Other female characters inspired by Martinson would fi nd subsequent form in many of Roth’s novels, including Maureen Tarnopol in My Life as a Man (1974), the Polish-American oncology nurse Wanda Jane

“Jinx” Possesski of Operation Shylock (1993), and Faunia Farley in The Human Stain. Roth joined the U.S. Army in 1955 but received an early discharge because of an injury sustained during training. Roth devoted much of his time while enlisted to writing. Many of the stories in his fi rst published work, Goodbye, Columbus, were written during this period. Composed of a number of short stories and a novella of the same name, Goodbye, Columbus won the National Book Award in 1960, surprising many literary tastemakers, who argued that the previously unpublished 28-year-old had only won the coveted award because no established contemporary writer had published during 1959. Other critics saw Roth’s rapid rise in literary circles as a sign of things to come. His subsequent success bore out these predictions. Goodbye, Columbus contains many of the themes that would recur in Roth’s subsequent work, from Jewish-American assimilation to gender politics and sexual license in postwar America. The two works that followed, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good, were less successful and deviated from their predecessor in substituting a psychological realism and high seriousness for the rollicking Jewish angst of his fi rst work. This new style was heavily indebted to the American author Henry James, whom Roth had studied in college and graduate school and continued to admire throughout his career. After these ill-received works, Roth published the immensely popular and controversial Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. A fictional confession, the novel follows the life of Alexander Portnoy, who pursues sexual freedom and adventure, yet who is incessantly undermined by the ethical hand wringing caused by his Jewish upbringing. Roth’s novel became an instant classic, ushering in a period of great critical success for the young author. Although Roth received widespread critical accolades and commercial success with this groundbreaking glimpse into the psyche of a Jewish neurotic, his skills continued to develop. During the 1970s and 1980s Roth produced a number of notable works, such as the remarkable The Ghost Writer, which introduced his alter ego, the writer Nathan

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Zuckerman. In this novel, Roth explores his Jewish identity with newfound satirical zeal. Zuckerman’s mentor, E. I. Lonoff, is a thinly veiled caricature of fellow Jewish-American writer BERNARD M ALAMUD, and Zuckerman’s love interest is the Holocaust victim Anne Frank. In 1986 Roth wrote one of his most experimental works, The Counterlife. In this novel Roth probes the boundaries between fact and fiction in writing and sends Zuckerman to Israel to make sense of long-standing confl icts between Israeli and diasporic Jews. During this time Roth became increasingly preoccupied with Eastern and Central Europe— then still under the oppressive sway of Soviet-style communism—and the need for American writers to enter into dialogue with their brethren behind the iron curtain. To this end Roth inaugurated the Writers from the Other Europe series in 1974. Published by Penguin Books, this series gave noted writers such as Tadeusz Borowski, Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, and Ivan Klima a chance to reach a wider audience in America. Roth remained editor of this series until 1989. Roth’s work with the Writers from the Other Europe series is only one example of his engagement with political issues throughout his career. Other examples include his 1970 novel Our Gang, which lampooned Richard Nixon–era politics by imagining the key players in the Watergate scandal as members of a failing baseball team. The Human Stain dealt with a more recent national debacle, President Bill Clinton’s alleged affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinski, and the frenzy to impeach him. Roth’s efforts in the Other Europe series are also indicative of his long-standing preoccupation with investigating the ever-changing role of writers in the 20th century. Prior to the project Roth had long been known for his collegial relationship with other writers and his interest in discussing craft with his favorite fellow artists. Roth collected the myriad interviews he had conducted with writers over the years into a single volume, entitled Shoptalk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001). After Bellow’s death, excerpts from Roth’s illuminating Shoptalk interviews with the writer were published in the New Yorker as a fit-

ting postscript to the literary giant’s life. The Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, also profi led in Shoptalk, appears in Roth’s Operation Shylock. Operation Shylock features a fictionalized version of Appelfeld, one of the American Jewish writer’s great friends and the catalyst for his burgeoning interest in the meaning of the Jewish diaspora. As in Operation Shylock, Roth’s work has often been irreverent. In The Breast (1972), Roth plays upon Franz Kafka’s famous novella The Metamorphosis (1915), by telling the story of David Kepesh, who wakes up one day to fi nd himself transformed not into a bug but into a breast, the erotic object that has dominated his life up until that point. Kepesh appears in other humorous works by Roth, such as The Professor of Desire (1977), and somber ones such as The Dying Animal (2001), a meditation on mortality, sexuality, and the human body. Roth’s interest in playing with form has elicited comparisons of his work with that of the equally prolific American writer JOHN UPDIKE. Both are preoccupied with national and personal history, as well as the capacity of literary realism to represent the lives of Americans. The fl ights of fancy that characterize a number of Roth’s work during the 1980s and early 1990s never eclipsed his commitment to literary realism. Even Roth’s most experimental works, such as 1986’s The Counterlife or 1993’s Operation Shylock, feature fi nely wrought characters facing realistic situations that foreground the perils of their complicated ethnic and national histories. Critics have often questioned the autobiographical component of Roth’s fiction. Although his disastrous fi rst marriage had led Roth to vow that he would never wed again, he and the British stage and screen actress Claire Bloom were married in 1990 (after many years of dating). After their relationship ended acrimoniously, Bloom published a memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996), that detailed her problems with Roth. When Roth wrote I Married a Communist (1998), the second and least well-received volume in his American trilogy, many critics noted the similarity between Bloom and the hysterical actress figure in the novel, viewing her as a thinly veiled representation of his

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former wife. Further, Roth’s adoption of hyperarticulate, lascivious Jewish men to narrate his novels has led many to question whether the author is writing memoir or fiction. He has disavowed such an intimate link between his fiction and life during countless interviews and in his 1988 memoir, The Facts. In this work Roth further complicates the nature of his fiction by writing a straight autobiography that is interspersed by comments from his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who challenges the veracity of what is being written. Roth’s narrative strategy undermines the conventions of the memoir, as Roth so often does in other novels such as The Counterlife. The controversial Sabbath’s Theater (1995) has aroused wildly mixed reactions among critics. Some, such as Harold Bloom, call it Roth’s masterpiece. The novel features Mickey Sabbath, “The Evangelist of Fornification,” a 64-year-old arthritic puppeteer and academic, an aging version of Alex Portnoy. Sabbath obsesses about sex and death, mourns the loss of his mistress, and feels an “uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-fi lled life,” which has taken a downward turn since a phone-sex tape scandal during which he was forced to resign from a teaching position. Yet Sabbath, with his “laughable hunger for more,” cries out for more life: “More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis. . . . More disastrous entanglement in everything.” Throughout the work Roth weaves literary allusions to a range of works by literary greats as Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare, and William Butler Yeats, creating a tour de force for which Roth received his second National Book Award (the fi rst was for Goodbye, Columbus). Roth has twice been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Roth also received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral and the National Medal of Arts at the White House the following year. In 2001 he received the Gold Medal in fiction, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ highest award, for his entire body of work. Despite his varied, numerous achievements, Roth’s unwavering narrative voice has remained consistent throughout

his illustrious career: It jumps off the page or, as young Nathan Zuckerman puts it, “comes from just behind the knees.” Comical, poignant, muscular, biting, and brilliant, Roth’s work provides his readers with an unparalleled portrait of postwar America.

Goodbye, Columbus (1959) Published when he was just 28, Goodbye, Columbus marked the beginning of Roth’s literary career. Composed of a similarly titled novella and five thematically linked short stories, the collection touched a nerve in postwar America, particularly among Jewish Americans who were facing many of the difficulties experienced by the characters in Roth’s work. The novella itself was a sensation, sparking a series of imitators and a cinematic adaptation starring the Jewish heartthrob Richard Benjamin (1969). As does Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk’s 1955 best-selling look at the life of the Jewish everywoman Marjorie Morgenstern, Goodbye, Columbus contains the fi rst of many hyperarticulate male protagonists/narrators. Although Neil Klugman is a college graduate, he remains a lower-middle-class Jewish boy, toiling in the Newark library and staying with his aunt Gladys and uncle Max in a workingclass neighborhood. When Klugman meets the Jewish beauty Brenda Potimkin, he is carried into a world of wealth and privilege far from his accustomed landscape. The Potimkin clan lives of leisure and conspicuous consumption in Short Hills, a wealthy area far removed from the Newark Neil calls home. The Potimkins tan by the pool and engage in multihour tennis matches. Brenda’s brother, instead of attending a local college, travels to Ohio for university, successfully mixing with the goyim in a way Neil could never imagine. Brenda’s family challenges Neil’s class expectations and sets the scene for a typically acerbic Roth satire on the excesses of the nouveau riche. While Brenda’s father, Ben, has the same working-class background as Neil, he takes great pains to separate his children from the world of their immigrant

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forebears—an increasingly common scenario in middle-class Jewish-American life, according to Roth. While Neil experiences alienation due to the Potimkins’ wealth, their lifestyle also collides with his notions of Jewishness: The upwardly mobile Potimkin tribe is engaged in sloughing off not only their lower-class past but their ethnic and racial identities. If Roth’s honest depiction of the complexities of assimilation for American Jews drew readers to Goodbye, Columbus, it was his unusually frank discussion of Brenda and Neil’s lustful sexuality that kept them reading. Prefiguring his more ribald literary creations, particularly Portnoy’s Complaint, My Life as a Man, and The Professor of Desire, Goodbye, Columbus witnessed the beginnings of Roth’s interest in exposing the subterranean excesses of sexuality in postwar America. Goodbye, Columbus, which won the coveted National Book Award in 1960, introduced many of the themes that were to preoccupy both Roth and his audience throughout his career. It also heralded the entrance of a new voice on the literary scene— one that would produce an unprecedented number of books chronicling both the American and the Jewish-American experience.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Goodbye, Columbus is fi lled with issues surrounding class in postwar America. How does Roth use his unique descriptive gifts to render class? In what way do objects and consumption play a role in the way class is depicted in Goodbye, Columbus? How does Roth’s novella respond to its particular cultural moment—an era of unrivaled economic success and rising birth rate? 2. Marjorie Morningstar, a mass-market best seller published in 1955, had distinctly fewer literary ambitions than did Roth’s 1959 collection. Nonetheless, there are striking similarities between Herman Wouk’s narrative about upper-middle-class American Jewry and Roth’s biting Goodbye, Columbus. How do these works contribute to our understanding of assimilation in the American Jewish community after World War II? How do Marjorie Morningstar and

Goodbye, Columbus portray Jewish femininity, and how do they inscribe their critiques of Jewish upward mobility and economic consumption onto Jewish women? 3. Goodbye, Columbus was Roth’s fi rst published book. Although it is less formally innovative than some of his later works, it shares a number of themes with them. Most notably, in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth is concerned with what we might call the rhetoric of Jewish “chosenness.” Roth came under fi re for the way in which he portrayed both the cronyism of the Potimkins and that of the Jewish soldier Grossbart in “Defender of the Faith,” one of the other pieces in the collection. How does Roth begin a critique of what he will later call (in his novel The Human Stain) the “coercive ‘we’ ” of ethnic identity in his fi rst published book? 4. At work in the library, the protagonist, Neil Klugman, meets a young African-American child who wants help fi nding reproductions of the artist Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes. When Neil meets this youth, he is mired in worries about his Jewishness and his relationship to his working-class roots. Why does this child appear when he does? How do the Tahitian landscapes the child is seeking function as a portal to an authentic racial identity for him, and how does this pursuit of authentic identity relate to Klugman’s own search for meaning in Goodbye, Columbus?

“Defender of the Faith” (1959) One of the most controversial short stories collected in Goodbye, Columbus, “Defender of the Faith” relates the tale of Sergeant Nathan Marx, who has just returned from World War II, in which he has been “fortunate enough to develop an infantryman’s heart, which, like his feet, at fi rst aches and swells but fi nally grows horny enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing.” Despite his newly benumbed state, Marx soon fi nds himself annoyed by a series of incidents involving the soldiers whom he has been appointed

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to lead. The strident Jewish private Sheldon Grossbart introduces himself to Marx and begins asking questions intending to ferret out whether the new sergeant is Jewish, like Grossbart and his fellow privates, Fishbein and Halpern. After agreeing to help Grossbart and his friends attend Jewish services on Friday night, Marx increasingly fi nds himself required to grant special privileges to the men because of their shared Jewish heritage. He is often called upon to act as a translator to the platoon leader, Captain Barrett, who marvels at the demands of the Jewish soldiers. Despite resenting the role of mediator and spokesperson placed upon him, Roth suggests that Marx often feels powerless to refuse them. Marx has witnessed the destruction of once-great European cities and people. Without any way of making sense of the devastation that he has seen and the decimation of European Jewry, he turns to an atavistic sense of his Jewishness for comfort. He is moved by the way Grossbart and his friends “touched a deep memory. . . . It was a pleasant memory for a young man so far from peace and home, and it brought so many recollections with it.” Gradually, however, Marx begins to doubt whether his Jewish soldiers possess any authentic Jewish feeling or are merely trying to gain favors from their Jewish superior. After fi nding out that Grossbart has managed—through his incessant cronyism and expectation of personal favors—to exempt himself from being sent to the Pacific along with the rest of his squad, Marx decides to exact revenge. Roth’s story was poorly received by many members of the Jewish community, who saw his critique of Jewish nepotism and tribal unity as an embarrassment and an incident of Jewish self-hatred, a frequent critique of Roth in future years.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Although it is not explicitly discussed in “Defender of the Faith,” the Holocaust pervades the story. Research the effects of the Holocaust on American Jewry. How is the relationship between Marx and Grossbart informed by this catastrophe?

2. In “Writing about Jews,” Philip Roth takes exception to Jewish critics of his work who emphasize the need not to shame the Jewish people in front of “the goyim.” Read “Writing about Jews,” published in Reading Myself and Others (1975). How does it reiterate or abandon the themes introduced in “Defender of the Faith”? 3. Why is Roth’s short story called “Defender of the Faith”? Is anyone in the story actually “defending” the faith? How does it compare to other stories in Roth’s volume, particularly “Eli, the Fanatic”? 4. How does Marx’s experience of war affect his response to Grossbart? In what way does Roth describe the effects of war on the soldier? How can the contemporary phenomenon we refer to as posttraumatic stress disorder be applied to “Defender of the Faith”? 5. In this short story, Roth manifests a profound interest in ethical questions. How are Marx’s acts ethical or not ethical? How does he rationalize his behaviors?

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) After publishing two tepidly received books, Roth composed Portnoy’s Complaint under the pressure to live up to the promise of his fi rst collection of fiction. With the publication of his third full-length novel, Roth not only exceeded the critical expectations set up by Goodbye, Columbus but also scandalized a whole new sector of the American reading public. The title is indicative of the relationship at the heart of this novel: that of a patient and his psychoanalyst. As Roth defi nes it, “Portnoy’s Complaint” is “a disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature” (Portnoy’s Complaint 1). Beginning from this pseudomedical diagnosis, Roth’s novel is structured as the neurotic patient Alexander Portnoy’s monologue, one that explores his competing impulses. Portnoy’s Complaint is a dramatic set piece, an interwoven series of scenes

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that touch on the significant developments in its narrator’s life. The scenes are thematically joined by their capacity to illustrate the tenet at the heart of Roth’s 1969 novel: that good Jewish boys like Portnoy fi nd their every primordial sexual urge unmoored by their desire to remain good Jewish boys. In some ways Portnoy’s Complaint is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel: He provides glimpses into the development of young Portnoy’s consciousness and describes the psychic purging necessary before he can truly “begin” his life. Portnoy’s Complaint famously begins with the narrator’s description of his relationship with his Jewish mother. From kindergarten onward, Alex marvels at her ability to be everywhere and see everything her young son is doing, functioning as the “superego” that keeps young Alex’s roiling “id” in check. Using this Jewish mother figure as a starting point, Roth returns to the theme of Jewish identity that structured Goodbye, Columbus (and that he had abandoned in his subsequent novels), dealing particularly with the assertion that Jews like Alex’s parents divide the world between Jews and non-Jews. Alex claims that his parents’ entire worldview is circumscribed by their ethnic and religious identity. The most striking aspect of Portnoy’s Complaint, however, is the candid sexual nature of Roth’s tale. Alex’s adolescence is spent masturbating and fantasizing. In one particularly memorable scene, he masturbates with a side of beef. In another, his sister’s bra is transformed into an erotic fetish. Portnoy spends his youth lusting after unattainable blond-haired shiksas and his adult years attempting to convince women of every conceivable ethnicity to engage in sexual activity with him. It becomes increasingly clear as the novel progresses that these women are less human beings than tropes for Portnoy and, by extension, for Roth and America. Portnoy confesses to his psychiatrist: “I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds—as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America—maybe that’s more like it. Columbus, Captain Smith, Governor Winthrop, General Washington—now Portnoy.”

With the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth came under fi re from both Jewish groups and readers uncomfortable with his representation of male sexuality run amok. He also drew the ire of many women, who were distressed at the depiction of women in the novel. From his dysfunctional but sexually insatiable lover “the Monkey,” who critics contend is yet another variation on Roth’s fi rst wife, to “the Pumpkin” and “the Pilgrim,” college-era conquests who demonstrate his ability to take on American “Supergoys,” Portnoy’s women are stereotypes who aid in their narcissistic lover’s pursuit of sexual freedom. Despite its detractors, however, many hailed Portnoy’s Complaint as a masterpiece. As did his literary antecedent Saul Bellow, who distinguished himself by breaking free of literary and linguistic constraints in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Roth let loose his irrepressible narrative voice in Portnoy’s Complaint and forever cemented his reputation as a great American writer.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Roth uses a number of psychoanalytic terms in Portnoy’s Complaint. Look in an online dictionary of psychoanalytic terms or check a reference volume in the library. How do these terms— particularly the id, ego, superego, and castration complex—function in Roth’s 1969 novel? How do they structure both the life of Alexander Portnoy (via the many developmental epochs Roth describes) and the novel itself? 2. It can easily be said that Portnoy’s Complaint both anticipates and epitomizes the sexual revolution that would sweep America during the late 1960s and 1970s. Contrast the depiction of sexuality in the novel with Roth’s earlier representation of sexual mores in Goodbye, Columbus. How do the changes in Roth’s portrayal of sexuality in these two works mark historical and cultural shifts? 3. Many critics, particularly feminist critics, have remarked upon Roth’s portrayal of women in Portnoy’s Complaint. From Alexander Portnoy’s mother to his perverse companions “the Mon-

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key” and “the Pilgrim,” the women of Roth’s novel are often figured as overbearing, sexually insatiable, or otherwise dysfunctional. How can we read Portnoy’s Complaint alongside the precepts of the feminist movement that was gathering steam at the time Roth was writing his novel? 4. How does masculinity, or anxiety over masculinity, function in Roth’s novel? While Portnoy’s relationship to his mother overshadows much of the novel, it is from his relationship to his father, the itinerant salesman, that young Alex gathers his concept of a particularly Jewish brand of masculinity. What do you make of the scene between father and son in the steam room and the emphasis placed on the Portnoy paterfamilias’s constipation? In Patrimony, Roth’s memoir of his relationship with his father, he expresses ambivalence about the model of masculinity offered by Herman Roth in a manner similar to that expressed by Alexander Portnoy about his father. Compare the father-son relationships in these two books, one ostensibly fictional and the other autobiographical. 5. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth returns to a theme he had abandoned after the success of his Jewish-themed Goodbye, Columbus: the complexity and anxieties of Jewish identity in postwar America. Early on in the novel, Portnoy contends that his parents understand the world through the binary opposition between Jews and “Goys” (all non-Jews). Although the budding sexual adventurer tries to slough off these distinctions to embrace his universal “humanity,” he still views the world through much the same lens as his parents, but with wildly different results. How does the distinction between Jews and gentiles structure Portnoy’s Complaint? What is Portnoy’s relationship to his Jewishness? 6. Portnoy’s Complaint was published five years after Saul Bellow’s celebrated novel of a tortured intellectual, Herzog. How does Herzog compare to Portnoy? Why do both Bellow and

Roth provide their readers a glimpse into the landscape of postwar Jewish America through the psyche of an individual? What can we make of this focus on the guilt-ridden Jewish male intellectual in the works of Bellow and Roth?

American Pastoral (1997) The prolific Roth became known throughout the 1980s and early 1990s for producing irreverent postmodern works such as The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, books that play with the readers’ expectations while still delivering inimitable fi rstperson prose. In 1997, however, Roth yet again defied expectations by producing a dense, detailed, and realistic novel. American Pastoral, the fi rst book in what would come to be known as the author’s American trilogy, was a striking departure for Roth in a number of ways. Whereas readers had come to expect Roth’s novels to feature an in-depth portrait of a tortured and verbose male protagonist (often, critics argued, at the expense of gaining insight into other characters), American Pastoral was painted on a wider social canvas and featured penetrating analyses of a number of central characters. Taking aim at the vast shifts in society caused by the Vietnam War, the excesses of 1960s radicalism, and the cultural and racial enmity to which, according to Roth, they gave rise, American Pastoral is preoccupied with history on both the personal and national levels. As does John Updike, the fellow postwar American author to whom he is often compared, Roth attempts to combine a psychological account of his main characters with a broader social commentary on the aspirations of America during its continued industrialization after World War II. This marked a return to the realist roots that Roth had abandoned after lukewarm critical response to his early novels Letting Go and When She Was Good. American Pastoral is primarily the story of Seymour “Swede” Levov, a hometown hero who fi nds his world turned upside down when his college-aged daughter, Merry, becomes a bomb-toting member

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of the 1960s counterculture. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary alter ego in many novels, returns in American Pastoral, but this time to tell another’s story, rather than his own. When a now-aging Nathan Zuckerman returns to his high school for a 45th reunion celebration, he meets Swede Levov’s younger brother, Jerry, and is told the story of his older classmate’s heroic rise and fall. Fascinated by Jerry’s tale, Zuckerman takes it upon himself to re-create the details of his deceased classmate’s life and the events that led to his premature demise. Part of Zuckerman’s fascination with Swede Levov arises from the fact that this former Jewish classmate was widely regarded as truly “American” in a way that his other school friends could never hope to be. From his success as an athlete to his blond hair and blue eyes, Swede is viewed as the student most likely to succeed. Zuckerman provides the reader with an in-depth analysis of the events of postwar America—from the Vietnam War to Watergate, the Newark race riots, and the obsolescence of family-run businesses—to explain why Swede does not live up to the expectations that surround him in his youth. Many critics see American Pastoral as perhaps Roth’s strongest and most lasting contribution to American letters; the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 and made Time magazine’s prestigious 2005 list of the “All-Time 100 Greatest Novels.”

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For Discussion or Writing 1. American Pastoral—often labeled the fi rst in a trilogy that extends from the author’s treatment of Swede Levov’s postwar America to the McCarthy era of I Married a Communist and the culture wars of The Human Stain— marked a turning point in Roth’s literary career. Is American Pastoral appropriately viewed as the fi rst of a trilogy? Why would these works be grouped together? What themes recur in these works by Roth? 2. Roth’s most recent works have all manifested an increasing interest in American history. How does Roth’s portrayal of the United States in American Pastoral compare to his portrayal of

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the Jewish romance with America in The Plot against America, his 2004 dystopian novel about Nazism come home to roost on U.S. shores? Look up a defi nition for the literary convention pastoral. How does the concept of “the pastoral” function as a defi ning principle of the narrative? Is Roth’s novel a uniquely American pastoral? How do the title and the ideology of the pastoral relate to the frequent Genesis imagery in American Pastoral? Although critics often distinguish American Pastoral from Roth’s earlier works, the novel also marks the return of Nathan Zuckerman, the alter ego who saw Roth through so many novels. Why this return? What role does Zuckerman play in American Pastoral? How does Roth use his position and his cobbled-together narrative as a commentary on the role of the writer and on the possibility of establishing the truth about another’s life? In American Pastoral Roth begins explicitly to address the theme of race and postwar race relations, a topic that had remained mostly subtextual in his earlier works. What can we make of Roth’s depiction of the Newark race riots in American Pastoral? Do they manifest a particularly cynical response to the rise of black nationalism and the political radicalism of the 1960s? How does Roth’s representation of the waning of Jewish racial difference in American Pastoral play a part in this depiction? How does American Pastoral compare to The Human Stain, Roth’s 2000 novel about race in America? Like John Updike, Roth is preoccupied with regional American decline. In American Pastoral he attempts to re-create the world of Swede Levov and his antecedents in the glove manufacturing business with painstaking detail. He also focuses much of his text on the destruction of Newark and the area surrounding it. How can Roth’s representation of regional decline in New Jersey (often read through the decline of the glove trade) be compared to Updike’s depiction of Pennsylvania in his Rabbit tetralogy?

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The Human Stain (2000) Published during the heyday of identity politics and the academic culture wars to which they gave rise, The Human Stain is yet another of Roth’s highly literate and entertaining fictions and a work that reflects pressing social concerns. Coleman Silk, the protagonist of this meditation on race and the self, leaves home and family at the age of 18 to join the U.S. Navy. When he leaves his comfortably lower-middle-class African-American family for life on the seas, he sloughs off what he perceives as the anchor of his race and uses his light complexion and indeterminate physiognomy to “pass” as a white man. Coleman Silk, high school valedictorian and favored son of the Silk clan, is intoxicated by the freedom that this transformation affords him. Returning to the United States, he continues his racial masquerade and adopts the identity of a Jewish man in order to fit in with the other dusky-skinned Jewish intellectuals flooding New York University on the G.I. Bill. While in New York, Silk meets Iris Gittelman, a woman similarly in fl ight, in her case from her radical Jewish background. Silk marries Iris for “that sinuous thicket of hair that was far more Negroid than” his own, a canny decision based on the desire to preempt any future doubts about the origin of their offspring’s hair texture (136). Coleman never tells his wife his secret and dissociates himself from his family so as to live the life of a postwar Jewish intellectual. Silk and his wife move to WASP-dominated New England, where Coleman gets a position as a classics professor at Athena College, a small liberal arts institution. The Human Stain begins years later, when Coleman Silk has retired from his position as dean and returned to the classroom. Five weeks into the semester, when two students in his roll book have not shown up for class, he “open[s] the session by asking, ‘Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?’ ” (6). Silk’s joke is woefully misinterpreted. The two missing students, “who turned out to be black,” hear about Dean Silk’s use of the word spooks, a derogatory term for African Americans, and make a complaint to Silk’s

superior (6). The new dean of faculty calls the distinguished professor into his office later in the day to face charges of racism. The charge of racism is ironic on a number of levels: Apart from his true race, as one of Athena College’s fi rst “Jewish” hires and its fi rst “Jewish” academic dean, Silk has greatly changed the landscape of the university, fi ring blond and blue-eyed legacies (individuals who had received academic jobs mostly because of their money and connections). Viewed as an aggressive Jewish upstart by the old guard of WASP professors, Silk also hires the college’s fi rst African-American professors, most notably Herb Keble, an eminent black political scientist who refuses to vouch for Silk when he is accused of racial insensitivity. The charges enrage Silk and give Roth a springboard from which to comment on the complexities of race in America. They also provide both protagonist and author with a chance to meditate upon changes in the composition of the American university. The rising literary scholar Delphine Roux, chairperson of the English Department of Athena, punishes the aging professor for his transgression and becomes a symbol for Silk of the antihumanistic thrust of the contemporary university. He scoffs at her embrace of the importance of “private” identities (racial, ethnic, or gender affi liations) in what he deems the “public” institution of the university. Conversely, Roux takes a particular dislike to the macho posturing of Dean Silk and his burgeoning relationship with the illiterate cleaning woman Faunia Farley. This confl ict allows Roth to weigh in on the battle over multiculturalism and the academy that was raging at the time of The Human Stain’s composition. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s longtime narrator, appears in The Human Stain (2000) to tell the story of the vanquished Coleman Silk. When Zuckerman meets his neighbor Silk, the professor has just ignominiously resigned from Athena College after being accused of racism. His wife, Iris, has passed away, the stress from the scandal causing her to have a massive stroke. Silk is at work on a vengeful memoir about his experiences at Athena,

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entitled Spooks. The title of Silk’s text is ironic not only because it recalls the term the aging professor uttered in the classroom, but because there is a specter at the heart of Silk’s memoir: his own masked racial history. Never mentioned in the vitriolic volume Silk shares with Zuckerman is the fact that he, like the accusing students, is African American. Nonetheless, after Silk dies in a violent car wreck with his scandalously younger lover Faunia Farley, Zuckerman fi nds out his friend’s secret and attempts to understand the professor’s life in light of this omission.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Roth often uses a text-within-a-text in his works. In The Human Stain, there are a number of such instances: Coleman Silk is at work on the tell-all Spooks, Nathan Zuckerman is engaged in writing his own version of the Silk affair, and Delphine Roux sends an e-mail that exposes her misdeeds. Why all of these texts? What role does the text-within-a-text play in The Human Stain? How can these internal texts be compared to similar texts in earlier Roth novels, most notably Operation Shylock and The Counterlife, not to mention The Ghost Writer? 2. While the complexity of Jewish racial identity in America arises as a theme in a number of Roth’s works, it takes on new dimensions in The Human Stain, where Roth’s “Jewish” protagonist grew up as an African American. What can we learn about race from the life of Coleman Silk? The critic Werner Sollors has argued that race and ethnic identity in America are complex and involve an interaction between relationships of consent (relationships we choose) and relationships of descent (those we are born into). How does Silk embody or not embody this confl ict between consent and descent? Is there a comparison between African-American and Jewish racial identity in America drawn by Roth in The Human Stain? 3. The Human Stain is considered the third work in Roth’s American trilogy of novels. It is a work deeply concerned with contemporary

history, opening with the events surrounding President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearing in the 1990s and going on to provide a commentary on the changing nature of ethnic identity in postwar America. How does Roth interweave personal and national history in The Human Stain? In what way do the trials of Coleman Silk, Delphine Roux, and Faunia Farley illuminate the historical era in which he is writing? 4. Roth has long been deemed a preeminent American author. In The Human Stain, one way he manifests this place in the genealogy of American writing is by referring frequently to the 19th-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. What role does Hawthorne, particularly his “romantic” novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), play in the world of The Human Stain? How does Roth’s theme of stigma and Puritanism relate to Hawthorne’s use of these tropes? 5. When Roth wrote The Human Stain, the story of Anatole Broyard was being discussed throughout America. Broyard was a popular writer and intellectual in the 1950s who disguised his African-American identity throughout his life. It was only after his death in the 1990s that people began discussing this lifelong example of racial passing. Research the history of Anatole Broyard. How do you think this narrative influenced Roth? What light does Broyard’s story shed on race in America? 6. The literature of passing has a long history in American letters. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) are two notable examples of the genre. How does Coleman Silk compare to the protagonists of these two works about racial transformation and masquerade in America? How should our reading of The Human Stain be affected by the fact that it is written by a white man? What should we make of this instance of racial ventriloquism, Roth’s donning the voice of a race not his own, just as Silk dons another race?

Philip Roth 449 FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ROTH AND HIS WORK 1. While Philip Roth is often classified with his fellow Jewish writers, particularly Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, he is a member of a newer generation than these authors. How does Roth’s status as what we might call a “secondgeneration” Jewish-American author affect his reading of Jewish life and his reception as an exemplary American author? Moreover, how might we compare Roth’s work to that of “third-generation” Jewish authors, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Allegra Goodman, or Michael Chabon? How might Roth respond to this creation of a canon of Jewish writers with him at its center? 2. Roth has long expressed ambivalence toward his Jewish identity. In “Writing about Jews,” published in Reading Myself and Others (1975), one of Roth’s many published works of nonfiction, he takes up the issue of being asked to answer critics about his representation of Jewish identity in his fiction. Although he expresses anger about being required to act as a representative for the Jewish people throughout this piece, he suggests that Jewish-American writers and fiction might be more appropriately representative of American Jews than the rabbi and his empty platitudes. How does this complex attitude toward Jewishness manifest itself throughout Roth’s prose? 3. Roth’s anxiety about the responsibility of being representative is comparable to that expressed by African-American fiction writers called upon to speak for and about other black Americans. While writers such as JAMES BALDWIN and Richard Wright seemed better able to grapple with these issues, R ALPH ELLISON, in particular, scoffed at the call to be a representative. Are Roth and Ellison comparable? How does The Human Stain, Roth’s novel about a “black” academic in the Ellison model, factor into this comparison? 4. Roth has long been interested in using his fiction to depict the changing nature of postwar

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America. In The Plot against America, in particular, the reader gains insight into Roth’s ideas about a particularly Jewish relationship to America. Trace Roth’s ideas about Jews in America from Goodbye, Columbus, his fi rst published collection, to this later work. What has changed and what has remained the same in his portrayal of this complex relationship? Throughout his career, Roth has been plagued by criticisms of his representation of women. Is there a theme to Roth’s depiction of women throughout his oeuvre? Should an acknowledgment of Roth’s sexism affect our reading of his novels? What about Roth’s representation of masculinity in his novels: Does an evaluation of his representation of masculinity complicate our understanding of the role gender plays in his work? Roth’s novels have often focused on the body and representing the materiality of the body in all its manifestations. From works such as Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) to The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and The Dying Animal (2001), Roth has provided a detailed description of the human body, whether in sexual ecstasy, physical pain, or the throes of death. What can we make of his preoccupation with human bodies, their messiness, and pleasure? Roth’s work often manifests a profound commitment to literary realism. At the same time, it is highly experimental, formally innovative, and voice-driven—like much postmodern American fiction produced during the same period. Can we rightly compare Roth to such writers as Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, or David Foster Wallace—all of whom eschew commitments to realism in order to play with the conventions of fiction? Or, is Roth’s work more akin to that of his fellow Jewish authors Bellow and Malamud? Roth is one of America’s most prolific and critically successful authors. He is often marked as the postwar American author. With this label in mind, is it appropriate to call Roth a “Jewish author” at all? Does Jewish writing merit a separate subcategory of literature as

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African-American or Chicano literature does? Or, is Roth too much an American author to necessitate this form of ethnic separatism or differentiation? 9. Roth has long drawn attention to the haziness of the line between fact and fiction in his work. How do works like The Counterlife, The Plot against America, or Operation Shylock complicate our notions of the division between autobiography and fiction? Why might Roth be playing with readers’ expectations about the boundary between life and literature in this way? How do his many nonfiction works, from his memoirs The Facts and Patrimony to critical collections such as Reading Myself and Others and Shoptalk further add to this collision between fiction and fact? WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Appelfeld, Aharon. Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth. Translated by Jeffrey M. Green. New York: Fromm International, 1993. Berryman, Charles. “Philip Roth and Nathan Zuckerman: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Prometheus.” Contemporary Literature 31, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 177–190. Bloom, Harold, ed. Philip Roth. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Furman, Andrew. Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: The Return of the Exiled. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Gilman, Sander L. Multiculturalism and the Jews. New York: Routledge, 2006. Greenberg, Robert M. “Transgression in the Fiction of Philip Roth.” Twentieth Century Literature 43, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 487–506. Kartiganer, Donald. “Ghost-Writing: Philip Roth’s Portrait of the Artist.” AJS Review 13, nos. 1–2 (Spring 1988): 153–169.

Kremer, S. Lillian. “Philip Roth’s Self-Reflexive Fiction.” Modern Language Studies 28, nos. 3–4 (Autumn 1998): 57–72. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 2002. Parrish, Timothy L. “Imagining Jews in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock.” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 575–602. “Philip Roth Society.” Available online. URL: http:// orgs.tamu-commerce.edu/rothsoc. Accessed July 23, 2009. “Philip Roth Studies.” Available online. URL: http:// www.heldref.org/roth.php. Accessed May 21, 2007. Posnock, Ross. Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Roth, Philip. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988. ———. Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Royal Derek, Parker, ed. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Foreword by Daniel Walden. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Shostak, Debra B. Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. ———. “Return to the Breast: The Body, the Masculine Subject, and Philip Roth.” Twentieth Century Literature 45, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 317–335. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Solotaroff, Ted, and Nessa Rapoport, eds. Writing Our Way Home: Contemporary Stories by American Jewish Writers. New York: Schocken Books, 1992. Wallace, James D. “This Nation of Narrators: Transgression, Revenge and Desire in Zuckerman Bound.” Modern Language Studies 21, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 17–34.

Jennifer Glaser

J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though. (The Catcher in the Rye)

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mong the most famous literary figures of the 20th century, J(erome) D(avid) Salinger is known both for his writing, especially his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and for his refusal to become a celebrity figure. The biographer Ian Hamilton described Salinger as a man “famous for not wanting to be famous”. Until his death in 2010, Salinger’s reclusive lifestyle, unmatched in tenacity by any author in living memory—with the exception of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, who is said to have “out-Salingered Salinger”— engendered a cultlike mystique. His fan base is uncommonly loyal and ardent. Although Salinger published no new fiction after 1965, his collected works continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Yet, in spite of his popularity, Salinger’s personal history remains a collage of sketchy details and uncorroborated anecdotes. Salinger’s withdrawal from the public domain creates a paradox for curious admirers and serious biographers alike. On the one hand, the author always refused to explain his motives or give a fi rst-person account of his life. On the other hand, Salinger’s stories, particularly those published in the 1940s and early 1950s, invite readers into his private sphere, for they are heavily indebted to the author’s personal experiences. Unlike Holden Caulfield’s dream author, Salinger often seemed contemptuous of his readership, a fact that begs the question, How can we really know J. D. Salinger?

The second child and only son of Sol and Miriam Jillich, Salinger was born in Manhattan on New Year’s Day 1919. Known by his family as “Sonny,” Salinger was raised in a Jewish household, one that moved frequently during the boy’s early years. In 1932, the same year Sonny celebrated his bar mitzvah, the Salingers settled into an apartment on Park Avenue. Located in one of New York City’s most exclusive neighborhoods, the new home verified Sol’s success in the competitive import-export business and became an outward sign that the family had “made it” in upper-class White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture. Around the same time, Salinger and his older sister, Doris, discovered that Miriam was born a Christian into a Scotch-Irish home and had, around the time she converted to Judaism, changed her name from Marie to appease Sol’s family. The revelation coincided with Salinger’s fi rst enrollment in a private Christian academy, the McBurney School, where Sol received special dispensation for his son to attend. Never more than a mediocre student, Salinger received poor grades and, after two years, was asked not to return. Thinking his son needed discipline, Sol sent Salinger to Valley Forge Military Academy, a boarding school in nearby Pennsylvania, where, despite another mediocre academic résumé, he graduated in 1936. Salinger followed high school with a half-hearted attempt at college, attending New York University

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for two semesters before dropping out. By this time Salinger had been composing stories in his spare time for a few years and had even begun to dream of a career as a writer. His father had other plans. In 1937, growing impatient with his son’s lack of interest in academia and the family business, Sol sent Salinger to Europe to learn the meat and cheese importing trade. Salinger spent most of his time in Vienna and Bydgoszcz, a small city in northern Poland. The trip had the opposite effect Sol intended: While shadowing a family friend who bought and sold pigs for the ham industry, Salinger was so disgusted he vowed never to follow in his father’s footsteps. He sojourned in Austria and Poland at a critical time in European history. Adolf Hitler had been German chancellor for nearly five years when Salinger arrived. Just months after Salinger returned home, Austria ceded political autonomy to the Nazis. A year later, Germany invaded Poland, marking the official beginning of World War II. During Salinger’s stay in both countries, anti-Semitism had reached a fevered pitch, and although Salinger has never publicly commented on his European stay, the agitation and terror consuming the Continent during the late 1930s made a lasting impression. Four years later, when the United States declared war on Germany and Japan, Salinger volunteered for military duty. In the years between touring Europe and joining the army, Salinger developed his craft. He made a second run at postsecondary education in 1938, attending Ursinas College in Collegetown, Pennsylvania. In the nine weeks he studied there, he wrote a weekly humor column for the school newspaper, earning a reputation as a witty essayist and storyteller. The following semester, once again living with his parents, Salinger audited a short-story writing course at Columbia University. The class instructor, Whit Burnett, quickly recognized Salinger’s potential. Burnett had a keen eye for gifted young writers; his literary journal, Story, published early works by several now-famous authors, including TRUMAN CAPOTE, JOSEPH H ELLER , Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, and Richard Wright.

In 1940, when “The Young Folks” appeared in the March–April issue of Story, Salinger joined the list of writers Burnett had “discovered.” Primarily because of Burnett’s reputation, several editors of popular magazines took notice. From 1940 until he stopped publishing in the mid-1960s, Salinger experienced little difficulty fi nding a public venue for his work. Over the next two years, Salinger published three more stories: “Go See Eddie” (1940) in University of Kansas City Review, “The Hang of It” (1941) in Collier’s, and “The Heart of a Broken Story” (1941) in Esquire. Joining the military did not slow Salinger’s momentum. Between 1942 and 1945 he produced 12 stories, three of which appeared in Burnett’s journal. The other nine were published in so-called slicks, popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and Esquire, which enjoyed wide readerships despite lackluster literary reputations. Read in chronological order, these stories chart Salinger’s developing style, including his ear for local speech patterns and his preference for dialogue. They also map a growing disillusionment with social constructs, which, in his later works, cripple the individual autonomy of his characters, making it nearly impossible for them to form an authentic sense of self. By 1945 Salinger’s sentimental tone had given way to pessimism. The attitude shift makes sense in light of the author’s experiences. On June 6, 1944, after spending more than two years training for military action, Salinger landed on Utah Beach with the army’s Fourth Infantry Division, part of the Allies’ D-day invasion of Nazi-occupied France. In the ensuing 11 months, Salinger fought in several of the war’s deadliest campaigns, including the Battle of Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. Between D-day and the end of the war in Europe (May 8, 1945), the Fourth Division incurred an average of 2,000 casualties per month. The carnage took its toll on Salinger’s psyche. Two months after the end of combat operations, probably suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, Salinger checked into a military hospital in Nuremburg, where he recuperated for several weeks. Once released, he

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remained in Europe as a private contractor for the Department of Defense; during that time he met and married a young woman named Sylvia, about whom little is known. Although she relocated to the United States with Salinger in May 1946, Sylvia returned almost immediately to Europe, where she fi led for divorce. Later that year Salinger endured another blow. For some time Burnett had wanted to collect Salinger’s best work under the working title The Young Folks. After Burnett and Salinger ironed out the details, Lippincott declined to publish the book. When the deal fell through, Salinger blamed Burnett. In the blink of an eye the trust Burnett had earned as Salinger’s mentor and fi rst publisher evaporated, and until Burnett’s 1973 death, Salinger refused to work with him. The setbacks notwithstanding, 1946 was a milestone year for Salinger. On December 21, the New Yorker published “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” kicking off a long relationship between the magazine and one of its most famous contributors. Among American weeklies, the New Yorker was unique; at that time it was the only widely read and well-respected literary venue. It could afford to pay contributors well without sacrificing its esteem among scholars and critics. An early version of Catcher in the Rye, “Slight Rebellion” had been gathering dust at the New Yorker’s headquarters for five years. Approved for publication in late 1941, the story was shelved after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that made the tale of a self-absorbed adolescent seem trite. When the war ended, American life began returning to normal, and the New Yorker fi nally printed “Slight Rebellion.” Salinger’s popularity with both critics and general audiences skyrocketed. In early 1948, after placing stories in Mademoiselle and Cosmopolitan, Salinger published “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” in the New Yorker. The story of a young war veteran’s suicide, “Bananafish” marked the beginning of Salinger’s most critically acclaimed period. During that time he published all of his Nine Stories as well as his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye. First conceived as a novella, Catcher grew to novel length over the

course of a decade. Upon its 1951 publication the book expanded Salinger’s audience beyond magazine readers; within a few years of its release it had become standard reading for members of early 1950s counterculture. Catcher’s popularity thrust Salinger into the limelight. Uncomfortable with fame, he quickly grew impatient with the public. In 1953 he moved from the New York area to Cornish, New Hampshire, a remote rural community where he could escape interview-seeking journalists and autograph-hunting admirers. Also in 1953 Salinger published his second book, Nine Stories. A collection of his best short work, it cemented Salinger’s reputation with “serious” critics and academics. Unlike Catcher, which garnered mixed reviews, Nine Stories was met with near-universal acclaim. The Pulitzer Prize– winning author EUDOR A WELTY heaped praise on the book in her New York Times review, declaring Salinger’s writing “original, fi rst rate, serious, and beautiful.” Although Nine Stories consists entirely of previously released material, scholars have often treated it as a short story cycle, a collection binding individual narratives into a unified whole. In this case, each of the Nine Stories portrays a different way of confronting a hollow, materialistic world. From Seymour Glass’s suicide in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” to Teddy McArdle’s serene acceptance of death in “Teddy,” Salinger explores the clash between the individual’s search for spiritual meaning and the social mechanisms that stand in his or her way. After Nine Stories, Salinger’s writing changed. He remained preoccupied with the individual’s struggle to cope in a “plastic,” materialist world, but his tone became didactic. From the early 1950s onward Salinger developed a religious perspective combining Zen Buddhism, Vedanta Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity. At the same time, he adopted a vision of the artist popular among 19th-century romantics. According to this view, the artist is an exceedingly rare individual in touch with a divine imagination, which he transmits onto the page, canvas, or musical score. The central figure in Salinger’s later stories, Seymour Glass, is the paradigmatic example of what

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the author calls the “artist-seer,” a person through whom we glimpse the sublime. Together, “Franny” (1955), “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955), “Zooey” (1957), “Seymour: An Introduction” (1959), and “Hapworth 16, 1924” (1965) proffer a vision in which art and spiritual transcendence coalesce, affording individuals their only escape from a “phony” world. These stories depart from Salinger’s earlier work in style as well as substance, often abandoning the narrative control and linguistic precision for which he was known. The shift was gradual but unmistakable. Critics chided him for it. Although the reaction to “Carpenters” was generally positive, reviewers were largely unsympathetic to Salinger’s other post-1953 efforts. Nevertheless, his popularity with general audiences, especially the young, did not taper. In 1961, with Catcher’s fame at an all-time high, Franny and Zooey topped the New York Times best-seller list for six months. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction was the third-best-selling book of 1963. The same year the New Yorker printed “Franny” and “Carpenters,” Salinger married Claire Douglas. The couple had two children—Margaret in 1955, Mathew in 1960—but, after 12 rocky years, Claire fi led for divorce. Since Salinger stopped publishing in 1965, a few incidents have drawn him to the public’s attention. In 1972, at the age of 53, he wooed an 18-year-old college freshman, Joyce Maynard, who dropped out of Yale and moved into Salinger’s home. The affair lasted nine months. For many, including the Salinger biographer Paul Alexander, the incident confi rmed a long-held suspicion: Salinger harbored an unhealthy predilection for young girls. In 1974 Salinger sued a San Francisco bookseller for publishing a pirated edition of his uncollected works. The suit was settled 12 years later in Salinger’s favor, the same year he fi led a legal injunction to prevent Ian Hamilton from publishing an unauthorized biography that included the author’s private correspondence. The suit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with Salinger in 1987. After a decade outside the public eye, Joyce Maynard published At Home in the World, breaking a 26-year silence

about her involvement with Salinger. In 2000 Margaret Salinger’s memoir, Dream Catcher, created another stir, largely because it revealed intimate, often disparaging details about her father. Although many Salinger fans accused Maynard and Margaret Salinger of exploiting the writer’s fame, their accounts reshaped Salinger’s image, painting a more nuanced, darker portrait of a man who continues to intrigue Americans. Salinger died in 2010 at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948) The fi rst of Salinger’s critically acclaimed Nine Stories (1953), “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was originally published in the New Yorker on January 31, 1948. Perhaps his most famous short story, and, together with “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (1950), his most frequently praised, it is often cited as a model of the short fiction genre. Set in post–World War II America, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” depicts a failing marriage. Little more than a common surname unites Muriel and Seymour Glass. The depth of their separation and the contrast between their worldviews are reflected in the narrative: They neither interact nor share the same physical space until the story’s final paragraph. Nearly all the action transpires in two scenes. The fi rst is set in a beachfront hotel room, where sunburned Muriel converses with her mother on the telephone. They talk mostly about Seymour: his discharge from the military, his release from a mental facility, and his erratic behavior. Growing impatient with her mother’s anxiety concerning Seymour’s perceived instability, Muriel ends the conversation abruptly. The second scene is roughly contemporaneous with the fi rst and is set on the beach just outside the hotel. Here, Seymour meets four-yearold Sybil Carpenter, with whom he shares a pleasant dialogue, goes for a swim, and relates a tale about the fabled “bananafish.” In the brief final scene, Seymour returns to his room, glances at Muriel, and shoots himself with his military-issue pistol. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” laments the shallow, materialistic culture Salinger associates with

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the modern world, particularly mid-20th century America. Typical of his postwar work, this story is devastating and pessimistic, presenting a protagonist burdened with posttraumatic stress disorder and severed from the shallow, materialistic world his wife inhabits. Muriel, though patient with her husband’s eccentricities, inhabits a cultural wasteland where meaning and happiness are found in “women’s magazines” and the latest fashions. The bananafi sh allegory captures Salinger’s vision of modernity. Yellow has long symbolized cowardice; its association with gold also evokes imagery of wealth. With their explosion in U.S. popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, bananas have often been associated with hedonism and materialistic excess. The bananafi sh, however, is illusory, a fabrication with no material reality. When Sybil claims to see one, she reveals not only her own neophyte material ambitions but also the vapid nature of these ambitions. By not disabusing Sybil of her fantasy, Seymour bears a resemblance to Holden Caulfield, who, at the end of The Catcher in the Rye, admits he cannot protect Phoebe from a “phony” world. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” set off two important phases in Salinger’s career. It is the fi rst in the Nine Stories cycle. It is also the fi rst story in the Glass family saga. Later in his career Salinger grew obsessed with Seymour and his siblings, using them as a vehicle to flesh out his own growing commitment to Vedanta Hinduism. From 1955 to 1965, when Salinger ceased releasing his work to the public, Salinger’s only publications treated the Glass family. Though he would not return to Seymour for several years, no character proved more fascinating to his creator.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The epigraph to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, reads, “With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys said to her: ‘Sybil, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’ ” Some critics have conjectured that Sybil Carpenter is named after the Sybil of Cumae, an ancient pagan priestess with remarkable powers of foresight. Like The

Waste Land, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is set just after a world war and captures the disillusionment that followed. Read Eliot’s poem and compare his vision with Salinger’s. Is one more optimistic than the other? Why would Salinger name a four-year-old after an ancient seer of death? 2. Many critics have suggested that Salinger changed his outlook between the publication of Nine Stories and that of his later works. Despite this, Seymour Glass remained on Salinger’s mind, growing into something of an obsession toward the end of the author’s publishing career. After reading at least one other Seymour narrative (“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Seymour: An Introduction,” “Hapworth 16, 1924”), compare the characterization of Seymour in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with that found in a later story. Is he the same character, or is Salinger’s characterization inconsistent? Does he change? If so, how? Write a well-developed essay that examines Salinger’s development through his characterizations of Seymour.

“For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” (1950)

The sixth tale in the Nine Stories collection, “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” fi rst appeared on April 8, 1950, in the New Yorker. Since its initial publication, professional critics and casual readers have admired the story, considered, alongside The Catcher in the Rye and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” among Salinger’s fi nest works. As “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” opens, the unnamed narrator, a writer and former soldier, reveals his occasion for writing the story: He has recently received a wedding invitation from Esmé, a girl with whom he has not spoken in six years. The invitation prompts him to recall a promise he made the day he met Esmé, to write a story for her, preferably one “about squalor.” Two stylistically distinct vignettes make up “For Esmé.” In the fi rst, the narrator recalls, in the fi rst person, his fi rst and

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only direct contact with Esmé while in London during World War II. Having just fi nished special operations training for the imminent D-day invasions, the narrator enjoys some rare time away from his fellow soldiers, watching a children’s choir practice before sitting down for a cup of tea at a local café. Thirteen-year-old Esmé, a member of the choir, enters shortly afterward and strikes up a conversation with the narrator, expressing interest in English and American cultural differences. Upon her departure with her caretaker aunt and young brother, Esmé promises to correspond with the soldier, requests a story of “squalor,” and expresses hope that the narrator will return with his “faculties in tact.” The second vignette transpires roughly a year later, shortly after the Allied victory in Europe. Set in a small Bavarian town, the narration shifts to third person, describing “Sergeant X’s” failure to keep his faculties intact. Suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, Sergeant X discusses a series of trivialities with a fellow soldier before discovering a misplaced package from Esmé, which turns out to contain her deceased father’s watch and the letter she had promised. Lost for more than a year, the correspondence and gift make him sleepy for the fi rst time in months. As all of Salinger’s pre–Glass family stories do, “For Esmé” ends on an ambiguous note, leaving the conclusion open for interpretation. However, for most readers, Sergeant X’s sleepiness signals the return of his faculties, a recovery prompted by the kindness of another. Esmé’s generous spirit—love, as the story’s title suggests—enables the narrator to remember what love feels like, a feeling that prompts him to write the story he promised. Although the second vignette makes up “the squalid part of the story,” the closing paragraphs take the story full circle. Sandwiched between two acts of benevolence, squalor appears as a temporary human condition, one that love can undo. Even in his darkest moments, Sergeant X foreshadows the theme, quoting Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov: “Fathers and teachers, I ponder ‘What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” Salinger composed “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” at the height of his powers, both as

a short story writer and as an observer of human psychology. While many of his earlier stories realistically capture individual experiences in the modern West, their tone and characterization are often myopic and pessimistic. In them there is little room for human potential. Salinger’s later works, especially the Glass family saga, allow for human potential but suggest that only spiritually enlightened geniuses possess it. These stories are didactic, presenting a model for the unenlightened majority to mimic. “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” fi nds a rare middle ground, capturing the horrors of modernity without resorting to despair or fi nger wagging.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Salinger is famous for his fascination with young characters, especially those struggling with their own immaturity. Esmé, on the other hand, is uncommonly mature for a 13-yearold. In this respect, she shares an important personality trait with the title character in “Teddy,” the fi nal tale in the Nine Stories collection. After reading both stories, compare Esmé with Teddy. What do they have in common? Is one character more believable than the other? To answer this question, list each character’s strengths and weaknesses. Which is the more fallible individual? Which is the more believable? Is there a link between fallibility and “being human”? 2. Locate the passages in “For Esmé” when the narrator underscores wartime differences between civilians and soldiers. Use these as jumping-off points to discuss whether those who do not have combat experience can relate to those who have. Is Salinger making an antiwar statement? 3. While researching posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), read a few accounts of soldiers, who, upon returning from combat, suffer from PTSD. Try to fi nd one account from World War II and another from a more recent confl ict, such as the U.S.-led war in Iraq. If time permits, read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” noting Seymour Glass’s postwar instability. Compare Salinger’s fictional accounts with the nonfictional ones.

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The Catcher in the Rye (1951) In summer 1951, when Little, Brown published The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger had been writing and revising it for a decade. Two of Salinger’s early, uncollected stories show the evolution of Salinger’s fi rst and only novel: “I’m Crazy” (Collier’s, December 22, 1945) was an early prototype of Holden’s visit with Spencer in chapters 1 and 2; “Slight Rebellion off Madison” (New Yorker, December 21, 1946) grew into the Holden/Sally Hayes episode in chapter 17. At the time of their publication, neither story seemed destined to grow into one of the 20th century’s most successful novels. The Salinger scholar Joel Salzberg sums up the novel’s impact: “The Catcher in the Rye has enjoyed a readership that has transcended the boundaries of age, education and culture, a phenomenon unparalleled in the history of modern and contemporary literature” (Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye 1). A story of adolescent angst in post–World War II America, The Catcher in the Rye is Holden Caulfield’s fi rst-person account of the days after his dismissal from Pencey Prep, a private boarding school in Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Having suffered a psychological collapse, Holden recounts the novel’s events several months later from a psychiatric hospital. In the fi rst of three movements, Holden leads the reader through his fi nal hours at Pencey: his guilt-ridden conversation with a concerned teacher, his aggravated encounter with his unhygienic dorm neighbor, and his angry confrontation with his roommate. Growing increasingly agitated, Holden leaves the campus earlier than planned, taking a train to nearby New York, where he plans to “lay up” in a hotel for a few days before skulking home to his disappointed parents. The New York hotel sequence marks the novel’s second movement, when Holden initiates a series of failed attempts to connect with old friends and new acquaintances. The fi nal movement begins when, in a last-ditch effort to communicate with a kindred spirit, Holden goes home late at night, sneaks into his parents’ apartment, and awakens his 10-year-old sister, Phoebe. Speaking to her in an unusually candid way, he confesses his desire to save other children from the

“phony” world that has driven him crazy. When Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield return from a party, Holden slips out and takes a cab to the nearby home of a former teacher, Mr. Antolini, who, in the past, has offered sound paternal advice. On this night, however, Antolini’s compassion borders on sexual affection, and Holden, frightened and disillusioned, abruptly departs. The following day, determined to leave his life behind and make a new start “out west,” Holden meets Phoebe at an art gallery to say good-bye, but Phoebe derails his plans when she arrives with her own suitcase. Instead of leaving town, Holden takes Phoebe to the nearby carousel, where he fi nds a sudden, inexplicable joy watching his sister go “around and around.” The Catcher in the Rye is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story tracking the protagonist’s psychological, moral, and/or intellectual development. Although critics debate the extent of Holden’s maturation, most agree that a subtle change becomes evident in the novel’s closing paragraphs. For most of the narrative, however, he is static. As do many of the people he criticizes, Holden suffers from an inability to see the world from alternate points of view. Holden’s limitations notwithstanding, Catcher portrays a psychologically nuanced, confl icted young man who is alternately kind and misanthropic, depressed and elated, gullible and cynical, arrogant and self-deprecating, imaginative and paralyzed. As Holden cycles through contradictory personality traits, he struggles to fuse his inner and outer selves into a consistent whole. In scene after scene Holden’s behavior—his performance in the exterior world—contradicts his interior monologue. For instance, while talking to Stradlater in the bathroom, Holden professes to “hate the movies like poison” but imitates them with an “exhibitionist” tap dance routine; elsewhere, he lambastes “phonies” and “phoniness,” yet he exaggerates his experiences and often lies without any discernible motivation. His ideas and actions wedged apart, Holden searches in vain for an authentic identity. Holden’s lack of personal integrity underscores one of Catcher’s central themes: Through social and cultural influence, the external world undermines individual autonomy, forcing the genuine

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self to wither or disappear altogether. Much of the narrative records Holden’s gut-level reaction to his own lack of autonomy, a reaction that leads him to dismiss everyone else—with the exception of young children and his dead brother, Allie—as a phony. Although Holden never defi nes phony, he uses it to describe a person whose beliefs and actions mirror prevailing cultural mores. As it turns out, every adolescent and adult meets the criterion, including, paradoxically, Holden himself. In a revealing passage Holden describes the intermission of the play he attends with Sally Hayes: “At the end of the fi rst act we went out with all the other jerks for a cigarette. What a deal that was. You never saw so many phonies in all your life, everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were”. Ironically, Holden precedes this tirade with his own assessment of the play. Like the phonies with whom he shares a cigarette, he is determined to prove his intelligence. Although he would never admit it, Holden suspects he is, like everyone else, a phony. Underneath his adolescent complaints lies a deep-seated fear of losing control over his identity, of becoming another drone in a swarm of human bees. The terror causes him to retreat inward and eventually precipitates a nervous breakdown. He fi nds the pressure to conform so debilitating that, when asked what he wants to do in life, he fails to imagine a single realistic answer. Instead, he misappropriates a Robert Burns poem, telling Phoebe he would enjoy being in charge of catching “little kids playing . . . in this big field of rye [when] they start to go over the cliff.” While the impracticality of his career ambitions points to an underlying psychological illness, the passage underscores Holden’s desire to save others from experiencing similar anguish. On the other side of the “cliff” the phony world awaits. Having seen its horrors, having succumbed to its pressures, Holden naively hopes to prevent children from replicating his mistakes. Like that of many of Salinger’s short stories, Catcher’s ending is ambiguous. As the novel closes, a question lingers: Given the infeasibility of Holden’s catcher in the rye model, is there an alterna-

tive for saving the innocent? While this question remains open to interpretation, the fi nal scene points to a possible answer. For Holden, Phoebe symbolizes innocence. She is a living example of the children Holden wants to “catch” before they succumb to a phony, materialistic existence. As Phoebe rides the carousel, Holden notes, “All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the . . . horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything” (273–274). For Holden the gold ring symbolizes phony decadence. When Phoebe reaches for it, she, as do the children on the edge of a “crazy cliff,” risks falling from innocence. Yet, Holden no longer wants to play the savior’s role. Phoebe must face the risk on her own terms. So too must Holden, though it remains unclear whether he accepts responsibility for himself. Throughout the novel Holden searches for a savior, but each candidate disappoints. Rather than assuaging his isolation, Mr. Spencer, Sunny, Sally, Horwitz, and Mr. Antolini leave him feeling ever more estranged. With each encounter, however, Holden overlooks an obvious source of redemption; he never considers saving himself. The oversight appears early in the book when Holden wonders how the ducks in Central Park survive the winter. He theorizes that “some guy” must arrive “in a truck” and take them away. It never occurs to Holden that the ducks survive by their own ingenuity, swimming around the lagoon to keep the encroaching ice at bay. We never discover whether Holden develops his own method for protecting himself from a wintry, desolate world; however, he seems to lay the foundation for it. As the carousel turns, while everyone around him scrambles to escape a rainstorm, Holden sits peacefully on a bench. Willing to face the deluge alone, Holden depends on his hunting cap to shield him. Goofy looking but functional, the cap is Holden’s token of independence. By relying on it—rather than a nearby overhang—Holden displays his fi rst act of self-reliance. Catcher’s resolution occurs when the central character accepts—rather than withdraws from—

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the world. It remains unclear whether at the time he wrote the novel, Salinger considered acceptance a viable remedy for suffering. In his later works Salinger arrives at a different conclusion. Beginning with “Teddy” in 1953, Salinger’s characters fi nd relief from a depressing reality through spiritual transcendence. Holden’s redemption materializes when he chooses to engage the world rather than escaping “out west” or retreating into his mind. Conversely, Teddy McArdle and Seymour Glass escape material pettiness by embracing death and the afterlife. Most critics think Salinger changed his outlook in the early 1950s, but because he has not discussed the topic publicly, readers must glean what clues they can from Salinger’s fiction. In Catcher, Salinger’s tone is often ironic, particularly toward Holden. For example, in spite of his immaturity, Holden considers himself more enlightened than everyone else; Holden claims to be an atheist but defends Jesus on several occasions; he values innocence but curses, drinks, smokes, and hires a prostitute. The disjunction between Holden’s selfimage and his behavior undermines his authority. As a result, readers must decide whether or not to accept Holden’s example. In contrast with Salinger’s later works Catcher does not tell others how to live. One of the most recognizable titles in American letters, The Catcher in the Rye has retained remarkable staying power. More than a halfcentury after its initial publication, 250,000 copies sell every year. Despite its popularity, or perhaps because of it, Catcher has weathered its share of controversy. A target of censorship from the beginning, the book’s explicit language and sexual content have roiled social and religious conservatives for decades. Between 1966 and 1975 it was the most frequently banned book in American schools. Thirty years later, the American Library Association ranked it among the top 10 most challenged books of 2005. The most controversial moment in Catcher’s history occurred on December 8, 1980, when Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. Obsessed with Catcher, which he was carrying at the time of his arrest, Chapman attributed his motive to the novel, which

he claimed awakened him to the toxic phoniness Lennon imparted to American youths. Although it innervated censorship advocates, the incident failed to stem Catcher’s popularity. To this day it remains one of the most commonly taught novels in the American educational system, and perhaps the best example of adolescent literature.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The Catcher in the Rye is often compared to another great American coming-of-age story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After reading Mark Twain’s novel, discuss similarities and differences between the works. Who matures more—Huck or Holden? How does each story benefit from Twain’s and Salinger’s ability to capture his respective era’s youthful vernacular? Both novels are frequent targets of censorship. Why? What do Huck Finn and Catcher have in common that makes some parents bristle when their children are assigned them in class? 2. The Catcher in The Rye has exerted tremendous influence on American literary and popular culture. Salinger is often credited for making adolescence a legitimate topic of serious literature. Since Catcher’s publication, countless novels, plays, and fi lms about youth culture have been produced. As a class, make a list of books and movies that feature adolescent or young adult characters. How many of them have something in common with Catcher? 3. The Catcher in the Rye is often credited with capturing the universal experience of adolescent angst in modern America. Yet, Holden has attended some of the best private schools on the East Coast and his family lives in one of Manhattan’s wealthiest districts. How do socioeconomic factors limit Holden’s understanding of the world? Given these limitations, is it possible to distill a “universal” experience from his story? 4. Holden’s hunting cap and the gold ring Phoebe chases on the carousel are two of the many symbols Salinger employs to convey ideas in The Catcher in the Rye. Make a list of other symbols and discuss their meaning in the context of the novel.

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“Teddy” (1953) The last of Salinger’s Nine Stories, “Teddy” was first published in the New Yorker’s January 31, 1953, issue. Named after its central character, 10-year-old Teddy McArdle, the story tracks a figure unlike any other in the collection, one who manages life’s absurdities with grace and sophistication. Typical of Salinger’s works, the action is minimal and can be summed up in a few sentences. While traveling by ship from England to the United States, Teddy has a conversation with his parents, during which Teddy’s father orders the boy to recover the family’s camera from Booper, Teddy’s six-year-old sister. Teddy fi nds her on the upper deck, convinces her to return the camera, and sits on a lounge chair to compose his daily journal entry. Within a few minutes Bob Nicholson, a young adult Teddy has met on the ship, reclines on an adjacent chair and engages the boy in conversation. During their discussion, while divulging his commitment to Hinduism, Teddy emotionlessly describes the conditions of his own death, which he cryptically predicts will occur later that morning in a poolside accident. After 20 minutes Teddy leaves to meet Booper at the pool on a lower deck. After a moment’s contemplation Nicholson decides to fi nd Teddy but arrives on the pool deck only to hear Booper’s shrill scream, presumably verifying Teddy’s prediction. For readers of Salinger’s previous works, such as The Catcher in the Rye and the other short stories in Nine Stories, the style and themes in “Teddy” are familiar. The story is character-driven and dialogue-intensive. It explores the evisceration of spiritual meaning amid rampant materialism. However, “Teddy” marks a new direction for its author, sketching, for the fi rst time, an outline of a fully mature human, one unfettered by material or emotional attachments. Teddy is sophisticated, a natural philosopher. The narrator calls Teddy “whole and pure,” noting that his face reflects “real beauty.” More important, Teddy recognizes beauty in objects others fi nd boring or repulsive. “Life,” he writes in his diary, “is a gift horse.” Unlike his argumentative, irritable parents, Teddy is calm, affable, and honest.

Although “Teddy” was fi rst published in a magazine and can be read without reference to Salinger’s other work, its full reach must be understood in the context of Nine Stories. As does the collection’s opening tale, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” “Teddy” ends with a death. The circumstances surrounding the deaths mirror and oppose one another. Seymour Glass and Teddy McArdle respond to identical stimuli—the modern world’s shallowness—in opposite ways. Where Seymour fi nds pain too intense to bear, Teddy fi nds beauty and serenity. The most optimistic story in the collection, “Teddy” is also the most didactic. Teddy has no flaws, making it difficult to avoid reading him as a model. Teddy presumes to know the “real” way of envisioning reality, thereby circumscribing alternative viewpoints as false and misguided. The story tends to polarize readers. Where some fi nd a refreshing solution for the myriad problems Salinger raises elsewhere, others discern a story with an unjustifiably preachy and judgmental tone. The latter readership is likely to identify an unintended irony: Teddy is the nonjudgmental figure par excellence, yet at times, the narrative seems scornful of Teddy’s relatives, particularly his father and sister. Whichever interpretation readers choose, one aspect of the story is certain. “Teddy” marks a dramatic shift in Salinger’s approach to storytelling. Every collected work that follows is suffused with the same religiosity.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The setting of “Teddy” strikes many readers as strange. Why might Salinger have chosen a multilayered steamship for the story’s locale? Do you recognize a link between Teddy’s explanation of Vedanta Hinduism and the setting? If possible, research Vedanta Hinduism before discussing these questions. 2. When The Catcher in the Rye thrust Salinger into the limelight, readers were fascinated with the author’s ability to render a realistic vision of American adolescence. Over a short period Salinger developed a reputation for constructing believable, realistic characters. With this in

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mind, do you fi nd Teddy believable? If possible, read another story or two in the collection. Citing examples of Teddy’s speech and journal writing, compare Teddy with another Salinger character. How are they similar? Different?

“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955) By the time “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” appeared in the November 19, 1955, issue of the New Yorker, Salinger had been funneling all his creative energy into the Glass family saga for two years. The New Yorker had published “Franny” six months earlier; the three stories to follow—“Zooey,” “Seymour: An Introduction,” and “Hapworth 16, 1924”—continued the trend. When Salinger ceased releasing his work to the public in the mid-1960s, he had not published anything other than Glass stories for more than a decade. “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” documents the wedding day of the eldest Glass sibling, Seymour, whose 1948 suicide was the subject of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Some 13 years after the planned wedding, Seymour’s younger brother, the aspiring writer Buddy, recalls the events of June 4, 1942. Ironically, on this wedding day, no wedding takes place, for Seymour leaves his fiancée, Muriel Fedder, waiting at the altar. The story focuses on Buddy’s misadventures in the hours after Seymour’s no-show. Unsure of what to do, Buddy joins a few members of the bride’s wedding party in a car headed back to the Fedders’ home. Thwarted by a parade and other trivial obstacles, they stop at Seymour’s vacant apartment, share a few strong drinks, and discover, via telephone, that Seymour and Muriel have eloped. When Buddy’s company leaves for the impromptu reception (sans bride and groom), Buddy passes out from drunken exhaustion. The story’s central confl ict occurs between Seymour’s champions—Buddy and, to a lesser degree, Boo, the eldest Glass sister—and his adversaries— the matron of honor and Mrs. Fedder, Muriel’s

mother, both of whom fi nd Seymour immature, insensitive, and possibly insane. The tension between the Glasses and Fedders calls attention to underlying confl icts Salinger explores throughout his works: spirituality versus materialism, the real versus the artificial, the interior versus the exterior self, intellectualism versus anti-intellectualism. Each of these confl icts underscores Salinger’s fascination with the presence—and possible transcendence—of alienation in the modern world. Although four stories featuring Glass family members had appeared previously, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” marked a departure. Not only was it the story that introduced Buddy Glass, whom critics often call Salinger’s alter ego, but it was the fi rst to include all the family members in a single narrative. Furthermore, it was the fi rst story situating Seymour at the center of the family’s saga, a kind of absent presence, a sounding board for his siblings’ psyches. In a certain respect, through his diaries, notes, letters, and most important, his influence, Seymour continues to live long after he shoots himself. Of all the Glass progeny, Buddy’s reverence for Seymour runs deepest, often bordering on deification. In this light, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” is a story of one man’s grail quest, his search for enlightenment and escape from a materialistic, artificial, exterior-oriented, and antiintellectual world. For Buddy, Seymour is the Holy Grail, a man with unique insight, which, because of Seymour’s suicide, remains forever out of reach.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In another Glass family tale, “Zooey,” Buddy divulges his admiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, calling it his “Tom Sawyer.” Warren French, an accomplished Salinger scholar, has remarked that “ ‘Raise High’ is much more indebted to Gatsby than has been recognized” (J. D. Salinger, Revisited 101). Read Gatsby, paying particular attention to two similarities, the fi rst between Buddy Glass and Nick Carraway, the second between Seymour Glass and Jay Gatsby. How is Buddy’s relationship with Seymour similar to Nick’s relationship

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with Gatsby? Do you recognize other affi nities between Salinger’s story and Fitzgerald’s novel? 2. Discuss the significance of Charlotte Mayhew, the beautiful actress at whom Seymour threw a rock when both were children. What does this incident say about Seymour’s character? What, if anything, does it say about Salinger’s treatment of women?

Franny and Zooey (1961) Although frequently called a novel, Franny and Zooey is two intertwined short stories, each of which was published separately in the New Yorker: “Franny” in January 1955 and “Zooey” in May 1957. When Bantam collected and published the stories in 1961, Salinger’s post-Catcher popularity, especially with adolescents and young adult readers, propelled Franny and Zooey to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, where it stayed for six months. The last of the tightly controlled stories of Salinger’s critically acclaimed middle period (1945–55), “Franny” paints a portrait of a young woman on the precipice of nervous collapse. Most of the action transpires at Sickler’s restaurant in an unnamed college town, a symbol for what Salinger considers a diseased intellectual environment. Both “Franny” and “Zooey” dislike the hollow Ivy League lifestyle, which, for Salinger, functions as a microcosm of American culture. In a conversation with her boyfriend, Lane Coutrell, Franny reveals her distaste for academia, the gender divide, psychoanalysis, and, like Holden Caulfield, all things “phony.” Midway through the story, Franny divulges an enigmatic infatuation with The Way of the Pilgrim, a book she has recently read. In it, she discovers the “Jesus Prayer,” a kind of recipe for discovering one’s untapped spirituality through the ceaseless recitation of a simple prayer. Lane, a stock character representing the deficiencies of modern social reality, grows visibly bored when Franny discusses her newfound interest in Pilgrim and her desire to locate meaning outside

academe. As Lane’s interest fades, anxiety overwhelms Franny. Feeling sick, she runs to the bathroom but faints before getting there. When she awakens, she begins “forming soundless words,” her lips moving without cessation, presumably repeating the Jesus Prayer. “Zooey” picks up a few days later in the Glass family’s New York apartment. Franny has returned home in a near-catatonic state. The story’s fi rst half takes place in the bathroom, where, in a long, often humorous conversation, Bessie, the Glass family matriarch, begs Zooey to comfort his younger sister. Impatient to rid himself of his nagging mother, Zooey agrees to talk to Franny. The remainder of the story is their discussion. Zooey monopolizes the exchange, using it as an opportunity to “hold forth” on a number of issues including the responsibility of the artist, the importance of maintaining an even temper in the face of “phoniness,” and the necessity of developing a holistic spiritual perspective. Ironically, the often mean-spirited Zooey advises Franny to focus on improving herself rather than criticizing others. Despite Franny and Zooey’s prolific sales, most critics consider it Salinger’s least successful work. JOHN UPDIKE captures the critical consensus: Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation. “Zooey” is just too long; there are too many cigarettes, too many goddams, too much verbal ado about not quite enough. (If You Really Want to Hear about It 124)

Though many readers have fallen in love with the Glass children, “Zooey” works only for readers who share Salinger’s religious perspective. Over the years many have found Zooey’s harangues inspirational, and many others have found them arrogant. As with Salinger’s later work, readers must decide for themselves whether or not Salinger’s vision is attractive.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. In both stories, the narrator associates Franny with sunlight. Why? 2. Of the many social mechanisms with which Franny is dissatisfied, gender roles in 1950s America are perhaps the most visible. Compare Franny’s frustrations with hindrances contemporary women experience. Write a welldeveloped essay that compares Franny’s concerns with modern-day concerns. 3. Tone describes the expression of an author’s attitude and beliefs as manifested in his or her work. Do “Franny” and “Zooey” have similar tones, or is it possible to detect a mood shift between the fi rst and second stories? If you detect differences between the two, what are they? Choose passages from each story to support your answer. 4. Toward the end of “Zooey,” the title character tells Franny, “At least I’m still in love with Yorick’s skull. At least I always have time enough to stay in love with Yorick’s skull.” The quote alludes to a conversation between Hamlet and Horatio in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. After reading Act 5; Scene 1 of the play, discuss what Zooey means. What does Yorick’s skull represent to Zooey? How is Zooey (and/or Franny) similar to Hamlet? 5. The American novelist and short story writer John Updike criticizes Franny and Zooey for a lack of continuity. “The Franny of ‘Franny’ and the Franny of ‘Zooey,’ ” he writes, “are not the same person. The heroine of ‘Franny’ is a pretty college girl passing through a plausible moment of disgust. . . . The Franny of ‘Zooey,’ on the other hand, is Franny Glass, the youngest of the seven famous Glass children. . . . The Way of a Pilgrim, far from being newly encountered at college, comes from Seymour’s desk, where it has been for years. One wonders how a girl raised in a home where Buddhism and crisis theology were table talk could have postponed her crisis so long and, when it came, be so disarmed by it” (If You Really Want to Hear about It 122–123). Discuss the inconsistencies between

“Franny” and “Zooey.” Is Franny the same person in both stories, or did Salinger alter her personality to fit his narrative scheme?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON SALINGER AND HIS WORK 1. In Salinger’s later works, he equates artists with religious prophets, developing a theory of art reminiscent of 19th-century romanticism. For Salinger, true artists are “seers,” visionaries who channel divine inspiration into their work. Beginning with the 1955 publication of “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” Salinger’s stories lionize Seymour Glass, whom his brother frequently calls an “artist-seer.” Isolate passages in one or more of Salinger’s last four stories that develop these ideas. Next, read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and chapter 13 of Samuel Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. How does Salinger’s vision compare with Coleridge’s theory of the imagination and/or Shelley’s assertion, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World” (“A Defense of Poetry”). Are there limitations in these ideas about art and artists? Must one be a once-in-a-generation genius to understand and/ or produce art? 2. Is it a writer’s responsibility to share his or her work? Discuss Salinger’s decision to stop publishing in light of his belief that true artists see what others cannot. If he is truly a visionary himself, is he being selfish by concealing his work from the public’s view? 3. Salinger’s later works are long, often meandering stories that are difficult to classify according to genre. Consult a few dictionaries of literary terms and develop a composite defi nition of the novel, novella, and short story. According to these defi nitions, how would you classify “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters,” “Zooey,” and “Seymour: An Introduction?” Discuss the merits of making these classifications. Do they help us understand literature, or are they

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false distinctions that distract us from a work’s meaning? 4. In the 1993 fi lm adaptation of John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, the lead character, Paul, delivers a monologue about The Catcher in the Rye and the lack of imagination in modern society. A brilliant con man with a gift for shining on rich people, Paul analyzes Salinger’s novel, supposedly summarizing his master’s thesis (in reality, Paul never attended college). Despite the false pretense of its delivery, the summary gives a fresh perspective on the novel. After viewing the fi lm discuss the following: (a) How does Paul’s “master’s thesis” change your interpretation of the novel? Do you agree with Paul that Holden suffers from a deficient imagination? Does Paul suffer the same deficiency? (b) Given that all the major characters in The Catcher in the Rye are white and rich, Paul, a poor black man, is an unlikely candidate to carry Holden’s torch. Do you recognize similarities between the two? How does Paul’s character ironize Holden? (c) In order to blend in to upper-class Manhattan society, Paul becomes phony—he pretends to be someone he is not. Yet, Paul is arguably the fi lm’s most genuine character. How does Guare’s screenplay expand upon and/or critique Holden’s concept of phoniness? In order to answer this question, fi rst defi ne what Holden means by phony. Next, isolate moments in Six Degrees of Separation when Paul seems most genuine. Is his speech about Catcher one of those moments? If so, does this mean that, in Paul’s world, Holden is a phony? 5. Despite the popularity of The Catcher in the Rye, many critics consider Salinger’s short stories his best work. Several scholars have suggested that Catcher is an overly drawn-out short story, while others consider the novel a series of self-contained vignettes. Paying attention to form, compare the short stories in Nine Stories with Catcher. While most novels develop more than one individual, Holden and Phoebe are the

only characters who appear in multiple scenes in Catcher, and Pheobe shows up in only two. All the minor characters—such as Mr. Spencer, Ackley, Sunny, Phoebe, and Mr. Antolini—are foils for Holden. Does this lessen the story’s novelistic range? How would the book change if Holden were not the only central character? 6. Of the many fi lmmakers Salinger has influenced, none has reinvented Salinger’s works quite as Wes Anderson has. Two of Anderson’s fi lms feature modern-day incarnations of Salinger’s characters: The Rushmore (1998) protagonist Max Fischer, who, as does Holden Caulfield, is kicked out of a prestigious prep school, is a feistier version of the Catcher hero; the story of a family of child protégés, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) owes a debt to Salinger’s Glass family saga. Watch Rushmore and Tenenbaums, though not solely in terms of whether they are indebted to Salinger. Discuss the similarities and differences between Salinger’s characters and stories and Anderson’s reinventions of them. How does Anderson’s tone differ from Salinger’s? Is Salinger’s sense of humor as absurd as Anderson’s? Are Anderson’s fi lms simple dedications or ironic reinterpretations? WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Alexander, Paul. Salinger: A Biography. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999. Alsen, Eberhard. A Reader’s Guide to J. D. Salinger. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. ———. Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1983. Bloom, Harold, ed. J. D. Salinger: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Crawford, Catherine, ed. If You Really Want to Hear about It: Writers on J. D. Salinger and His Work. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006. Eppes, Betty. “What I Did Last Summer.” Paris Review 80 (1981): 221–239. French, Warren G. J. D. Salinger, Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Galloway, David. The Absurd Hero in American Fiction: Updike, Styron, Bellow, Salinger. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

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Grunwald, Henry Anatole, ed. Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962. Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L. Blotner. The Fiction of J. D. Salinger. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958. French, Warren. J. D. Salinger. Boston: Twayne, 1976. ———. J. D. Salinger, Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. D. Salinger. New York: Random House, 1988. Laser, Marvin, and Norman Fruman, eds. Studies in J. D. Salinger: Reviews, Essays, and Critiques of The Catcher in the Rye and Other Fiction. New York: Odyssey Press, 1963. Lundquist, James. J. D. Salinger. New York: Ungar, 1979. Maynard, Joyce. At Home in the World: A Memoir. New York: Picador USA, 1998. Miller, James E. J. D. Salinger. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Newman, Jon. “District Court Ruling, Salinger v. Random House.” Available online. URL: http://www. law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/811_F2d_90. htm. Accessed June 3, 2007. Rosen, Gerald. Zen in the Art of J. D. Salinger. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Book Co., 1977. Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown, 1945. ———. Franny and Zooey. New York: Little, Brown, 1961. ———. Nine Stories. New York: Little, Brown, 1953.

———. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. New York: Little, Brown, 1963. ———. “Uncollected Writings of J. D. Salinger.” Available online. URL: http://www.freeweb.hu/ tchl/salinger/. Accessed June 3, 2007. Salinger, Margaret A. Dream Catcher: A Memoir. New York: Washington Square Press, 2000. Salinger.org. Available online. URL: http://salinger. org/index.php?title=Main_Page. Accessed June 3, 2007. Salzberg, Joel. Critical Essays on Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Salzman, Jack, ed. New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Sommers, Michael A. J. D. Salinger. New York: Rosen, 2006. Sova, Dawn B. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, edited by Ken Wachsberger. New York: Facts On File, 1998. Steed, J. P., ed. The Catcher in the Rye: New Essays. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Updike, John. “Anxious Day for the Glass Family.” In If You Really Want to Hear About It, edited by Catherine Crawford, 121–126. New York: Thunders Mouth, 2006. Weaver, Brett E. An Annotated Bibliography of J. D. Salinger. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. Wenke, John. J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

J. Earen Rast

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) Poetry and poetry alone has saved my life. (Letter to W. D. Snodgrass, 1959)

A

nne Gray Harvey Sexton’s restless lifelong search for her own identity shaped her poetry, which has often been labeled confessional because of its frank, personal subject matter. She wrote of her struggles to cope with the roles imposed on her from a strong, unapologetic woman’s point of view, leading more recent critics to label her poetry feminist. The classification of her work as confessional is one that Sexton disdained, and she paid little attention to the politics of feminism. Sexton’s bold poetry of intimate self-scrutiny, however, undeniably challenged stereotypes of women just as the American women’s movement did during the decades of the mid-20th century. Her poems gave powerful voice to the deep pain of wounded human beings, as well as to the everyday experiences common to women everywhere. Neither the urge to confess secret sins nor emerging feminism, however, can fully explain the contour of Anne Sexton’s life. Complicated by her art, her addictions, and her psychosis, Sexton’s life, like her poetry, was dramatic and weighted down with turmoil. She was born in comfortable New England surroundings on November 9, 1928, her future, on the surface, seemingly predictable. Her parents, Ralph and Mary Gray Staples Harvey, were affluent country club members who had conventional expectations of their three daughters. Anne’s mother and father were extremely strong influences in her life. Their hypercritical, unsympathetic presence continued to

dominate her thoughts and behavior, as well as her writing, throughout her life. The family tree also included relations on both sides who had suffered from various forms of mental instability, and the family tendency to mental illness would haunt the poet her entire life. Anne’s early life, filled with the social trappings of her wealthy community, followed the pattern her parents set for her. A beautiful and popular young woman, she attended a private boarding school and enjoyed a whirl of dates, parties, proms, a social debut, and marriage at the age of 19 to Alfred Muller Sexton II. Post–World War II society glorified the “natural” feminine image of wife and mother, and Anne yielded to their appeal. Outwardly, she fulfilled the roles that were expected of her, acting first as the flirty, fashionable, intellectually indifferent student, and then as the young suburban housewife, all the while carrying within her the seeds of something more artistic as well as something more perverse that eventually emerged in the voices of her poems. The relationships produced by socially approved roles were consistently fragmented and unsatisfactory for her. As a child, she had one extremely close, motherly relationship, with her great-aunt, “Nana”—Anna Dingley—who offered her unconditional approval, warmth, and friendship. Nana suffered a mental breakdown while Anne was in her early teens, but she recovered and remained close to Anne until her death. The maternal Nana appeared in several of Sex-

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ton’s works, particularly her play Mercy Street, as the writer explored the complex nature of motherhood. Sexton’s adult life was dominated by her own mental illness, for while she appeared to be the model housewife of the American 1950s, she was essentially a disturbed woman unable to care for her two daughters. She frequently heard voices that urged her to kill herself. Shortly after the birth of her children, in 1956, beset with depression and anxiety, she attempted suicide and was hospitalized. In the course of her treatment, her therapist sought to find something she could do to enhance her selfesteem and develop her creativity. He eventually suggested that she write about her own experiences. In response, she began to write poems. Her early poems were raw and unstructured, but from the first, they contained intensely personal subject matter and images of her own life. As a way of fighting insanity, she sought to compose her thoughts and retrieve her memories in verses that reflected her feelings about guilt and madness, family relationships, social confusion, female sexuality, and death. As a mental patient, she searched for the real Anne beneath all the roles and expectations pressed on her by others. The therapist’s praise gave her the reinforcement she craved; he urged her to keep writing not only for herself but for the sake of others. Sexton often referred to this encouragement as the source of her feeling that she had a role to play that was all her own. Writing poems became not only therapy but obsession and vocation. Throughout her life she continued to write, even as her mental health wavered. In 1957 Sexton timidly began attending a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. At that workshop she met the instructor, the poet John Holmes, as well as a poet who became her lifelong friend, Maxine Kumin. By her own admission, Sexton had not been interested enough in school to study poetry. Lacking literary allusions that could evoke associations in educated readers, Sexton’s poems plainly reflected her own experience. As a result, her language was accessible, straightforward, and explicit. Sexton’s critics often took issue with her dwelling on the wretched, even repulsive aspects of her experience, but she relished the power she found

in graphically depicting the irrationality that was her reality. What she learned and developed in the workshop was the craft of poetry, the techniques—she called them “tricks”—of making elegant poems with intricate rhyme schemes and patterns. She read, wrote, and revised endlessly. In early 1958 her first poem was printed, in the local Fiddlehead Review. Soon after, she had poems accepted by the Christian Science Monitor, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. Sexton’s work was often set in New England and was concerned with difficult family relationships. The voices in her poems reflected her troubled interactions with her parents; in a number of poems (such as “Young,” “The Death of the Fathers,” and “The Truth the Dead Know”) Sexton explored the complex bond between a daughter and her father. When Sexton read W. D. Snodgrass’s poem “Heart’s Needle,” about a divorced father struggling to cope with separation from his daughter, she immediately identified with the wrenching personal theme of the poem and recognized a kindred spirit. Autobiographical, direct, and emotional, the poem achieved exactly what she hoped to accomplish in her own work. She arranged to study at a workshop Snodgrass was leading at the Writers’ Conference at Antioch College in Ohio in summer 1958. There she sought, with his guidance, to locate her own individual voice, and Snodgrass reinforced her instinct to write autobiographical, “confessional” poetry. Snodgrass, who was to become her mentor and friend, had been a student of the well-known poet ROBERT LOWELL. Lowell, after a traumatic period in his life, was working on his own collection of autobiographical and self-analytical poetry. Sexton enrolled in a class that Lowell taught at Boston University in the fall and winter of 1958–59, where she was influenced by his style. As confessional poets, Lowell, Snodgrass, and Sexton all presented their experience in a stark and direct manner; they wrote about loneliness and alienation, and they spoke plainly about contemplating suicide. About Lowell, Sexton said in a 1968 interview with Barbara Kevles, “He didn’t teach me what to put into a poem, but what to leave out. What he taught me was taste. Perhaps that’s the

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only thing a poet can be taught” (McClatchy 11). In Lowell’s class, she met for the fi rst time another young woman poet from the suburbs of Boston, SYLVIA PLATH, and they formed the habit of continuing their intense discussions of poetry, psychiatrists, and suicide attempts after class over drinks. The highly educated, mentally tormented Plath had been writing modernist poetry with stiff, formal diction. Her association with Lowell and Sexton seemed to influence her to write more personal verse, and her work is now often grouped with theirs in the confessional school. In early 1958 Sexton wrote a complex poem about the relationship between mothers and daughters, “The Double Image.” The poem is an example of a form Sexton used frequently, the dramatic monologue, filled with images that startle the reader with their clarity. Concrete, often surprising images are the means by which Sexton sought to connect with her audience. In “The Double Image,” for example, she describes the voices compelling her to suicide as “green witches in my head, letting doom / leak like a broken faucet.” In her poem “Music Swims Back to Me,” the stars she sees through the bars of her window at the mental hospital are “strapped to the sky” as she is strapped to her bed. The night nurse “walks on two erasers” in “Lullaby.” Her “Ghosts” are women with “breasts as limp as killed fish,” and “fat, white-bellied men. / wearing their genitals like old rags.” The stark realism of her language often offended readers who were accustomed to more distance, more formality, and more restraint in their poetry. The prestigious Hudson Review accepted “The Double Image” for publication late in 1958. In early 1959, encouraged by Lowell’s praise, Sexton began assembling her poems for publication in her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Before the book saw print in May 1960, her parents had both died—Mary Gray of cancer and Ralph Harvey after a stroke. The same year Sexton was invited to give a reading at Harvard and won two notable awards: the Robert Frost Fellowship to study at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the annual poetry prize from the Boston literary journal Audience. She won an appointment as a Radcliffe Scholar in 1961. While To Bedlam and Part Way Back was under con-

sideration for the National Book Award, she quickly began writing the poems for her second collection, All My Pretty Ones, which received excellent reviews on its publication in 1962. In the fall of that year, Sexton won Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and the following year she won a traveling fellowship sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Over the course of the next decade, according to her biographer Diane Middlebrook, Sexton’s work won “most of the prizes, honors, awards, and fellowships available to American poets” (193). She continued to extend the boundaries of her achievements. Between 1963 and 1974 Sexton collaborated with her friend Maxine Kumin on four children’s books. Her 1967 collection of poems, Live or Die, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. This represented the high point of her critical acceptance, and her popularity among the general public continued to grow. Despite Sexton’s writing success, she continued to suffer from mental instability, surviving several more bouts of depression, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations. She became dependent on a variety of medications and increasingly on alcohol to ease her nerves. As a result, family and professional relationships deteriorated, providing even more material for her poetry. In contrast to its chaotic subject matter, Sexton’s verse, in her first collections, was carefully bound by rules of rhythm, rhyme, and meter. She claimed in interviews that when she started writing, she felt the need to harness the overflow of her emotions and experiences with strict, deliberate forms. Enclosing her experience of madness within meticulously ordered rhythms provided the poet with some control over unmanageable situations, and she enjoyed the fact that her brilliant, improbable images shocked readers and increased her popularity. Eventually, Sexton relinquished the controlled form she had cultivated in the earliest poems, and by the end of her third collection, Live or Die, even though she was still dealing with psychologically intense material, she loosened her dependence on the techniques and wrote in free verse. In 1967, as part of a pilot program, Sexton took a position teaching English literature at a Massachusetts high school despite her lack of a college degree.

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Throughout her life other writers mentored her, and she read literature voraciously to make up for having a spotty background in the subject. In 1968 she was awarded an honorary Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, the fi rst time a woman had ever been selected to join that chapter. In 1969 she published Love Poems; continued to work on her play, Mercy Street; and began teaching a seminar in poetry at Boston University. In 1971 she earned a full professorship at Boston University and published Transformations, 17 updated adaptations of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales. These poems show Sexton’s shift from the selfobsessed poetry of psychotherapy to an ironic assessment of the wider consequences of women’s roles. In her cynical, often humorous retellings, Sexton peppers the traditional stories with unexpected images from popular culture, while exploring her themes of madness, expectations, love, and death. Cinderella’s stepsisters have “hearts like blackjacks,” the sooty Cinderella herself looks “like Al Jolson,” and the prince’s ball is “a marriage market.” She updates the Grimms’ tales faithfully but surprisingly, often telling us in the narrator’s wise voice what life has taught her: Happily ever after is a fraud. In 1972 Sexton published her sixth collection of poems, The Book of Folly, followed by The Death Notebooks in 1974 and The Awful Rowing toward God, posthumously, in 1975. Additional work, including her play Mercy Street, was published after Sexton died of carbon monoxide poisoning, at her own hand, in 1974. From an early age Sexton had shown an interest in performing. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, as her poetry became more popular, she became a professional performer, teaching, giving readings, and eventually traveling with her own “chamber rock” group, “Anne Sexton and Her Kind.” She referred to herself as an actress, and in 1958 she wrote, “I suspect that I have no self so I produce a different one for different people.” Though these “multiple selves” did not assuage her mental confusion, they did feed her rich, dramatic poetry. By creating the personae of her poems, Sexton was able to try on an assortment of roles and explore the voices of her subjects in ways that were both biographically and psychologically revealing. Because of her bold, accessible writing,

she earned a large contemporary audience as well as a place among the notable poets of the mid-20th century. Fearlessly writing of her own mental, physical, and spiritual struggles, holding back nothing, she conveyed vitality, wit, and sensuality to a widespread readership. Her ability to create startlingly apt images led her poetry to achieve the goal she, quoting Franz Kafka, asks of it in the introduction to her second collection: They “serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” In the 21st century Sexton’s poetry continues to reach her audience with the clear voice of a woman passionate about life, love, and death.

“Her Kind” (1960) In a 1968 interview with Barbara Kevles, Sexton claimed that her intention in writing the poems that make up her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was to “give the experience of madness” (qtd. in McClatchy 13). The last poem that Sexton wrote for the book, “Her Kind,” became the poem with which Sexton most wanted to be identified; she gave a dramatic performance of it to open all of her poetry readings. In the short, three-stanza poem Sexton created a disturbing but powerful persona to show what kind of person and poet she was: a dangerous madwoman-witch. In a tightly structured format the poem hints at the roles Sexton has played in her own life. The rhyme scheme of ababcbc is formal and serves to control the material, a description of a woman clearly out of control. As with much of Sexton’s early poetry, she has worked hard to impose stylistic order on disordered content. The key line in each stanza is the penultimate one, in which the narrator describes “a woman like that.” Each of the descriptions is followed by the five monosyllabic words that leave no question of the author/narrator’s attitude toward this disturbing persona: “I have been her kind.” The woman described, though troubled, however, is not a passive victim of fate; in each stanza she is active. She haunts and dreams, fi nds and fi lls, waves and survives. Sexton’s imagery invokes witches, night, evil, loneliness, domesticity, sensuality, and pain. She combines third and fi rst persons

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in narrating the poem, blurring the line between the other and the self. The fi rst stanza introduces “a possessed witch” who haunts the night. She has “done [her] hitch,” indicating a duty fulfi lled, rather than a choice made, over “the plain houses” where normal people live. The abnormality of the narrator is confi rmed by her being “twelve-fi ngered.” Sexton reinforces her deformity in the fi nal B line: “A woman like that is not a woman, quite,” before the fi rst and third persons merge: “I have been her kind.” The second stanza raises images of the home and hearth: “skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods.” These common domestic items, however, carry the taint of the witch who uses them. She fills “warm caves in the woods” with these things and uses them to fix meals for an unusual kind of family: “the worms and the elves: / whining, rearranging the disaligned.” After this unsettling image, the tone of line C becomes an almost humorous understatement: “A woman like that is misunderstood.” The third stanza addresses a specific audience, the driver of a cart. It is possible to envision Sexton’s therapist in such a role. In the presence of this guide who has taken her on a painful journey, whose “flames still bite [her] thigh” and whose wheels have cracked her mental ribs, she feels herself stripped to “nude arms” that wave at villages as she searches for her own route. Recovery and survival may be the goals, but the narrator ultimately reasserts the power of this sensual housewife-witch: “A woman like that is not ashamed to die.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. What connotation does the phrase “her kind” usually carry? Contrast the colloquial use of the term with the manner in which it is used in this poem. Analyze the tone of the fi nal cbc triplet in each stanza. 2. Compare the voice and role of the narrator in “Her Kind” with those of “The Double Image” and “The Starry Night.” What similarities do you see in the ways Sexton creates the persona of narrator? How does she achieve the masking and revealing of the speaker?

3. Confessional poetry involves autobiographical self-revelation. Sexton said that “Her Kind” emerged from and was a means of describing her own experience of madness and exploration of identity during her early psychotherapy. Yet, she resisted the confessional label for her work. Analyze “Her Kind,” evaluating its potential to exist as a poem on its own, without the reader’s knowing details of Sexton’s life. Has she managed, for example, to create pleasing and meaningful word patterns and images that provide more than a representation of the author? 4. Sexton is noted for the power of her images. Examine the imagery of each stanza and try to penetrate its meanings. For example, in stanza 2, consider the domestic images and the manner in which Sexton twists their normal implications. Who are the worms and elves? Who is whining? Who are the disaligned in need of rearrangement? What do the warm caves in the woods mean to a mad housewife-witch?

“Housewife” (1962) “Housewife” appears in Sexton’s second collection, All My Pretty Ones, in which, she later said, she was trying to convey the causes of madness. The short poem represents a meditation on the way a traditional role can affect a woman who accepts it. The housewife that the narrator describes is married literally to a house. The house is a body; it is alive and has organs that allow it to function. Sexton draws attention to the kneeling posture of women who are wedded to their homes. In the lines “See how she sits on her knees all day, / faithfully washing herself down,” the narrator appeals to the reader to look at what happens to a housewife: She becomes the house; it is her own organs that she must spend her day cleaning, as a domesticated animal does. This endless cleaning, however, is fruitless; the dirt is incapable of being permanently removed. Men do not have entrée into the house/wife; they must “enter by force,” and for them the wife is a “fleshy mother,” to whom they are “drawn back like Jonah.” The fi nal twist gives the woman yet another

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role: not house, not wife, but mother: “A woman is her mother. / That’s the main thing.” In the conversational phrase “That’s the main thing,” Sexton reveals that both the man and the house are ultimately irrelevant. The woman’s fate is determined long before either one of them has entered her life; the woman’s mother is her identity, her inescapable destiny. Domestic imagery yields to biological imagery in this poem. The woman is enclosed by a structure, a house, but this house is her body, with skin, “a heart, / a mouth, a liver, and bowel movements.” It is fleshy, with pink, permanent walls. The house, to which the role of wife confi nes her, is her, and this is a truth she has learned from her mother, who also is her. The narrator clearly feels trapped by the demands of these living, breathing, needy enclosures—not just her house but also her body— just as she feels about her original enveloping, fleshy enclosure, her mother. Raised and trained by her mother, she sees herself as a product of her mother, unable to stop duplicating the behavior that has made her mad. Sexton employs no formal rhyme scheme in “Housewife.” One image fades into the next, leading us away from house and into mother. Sexton’s personal development and constant questioning of her roles paralleled the feminist movement of the 1960s. Betty Friedan’s work The Feminine Mystique had been published in 1963 and started a national conversation about women’s happiness. It questioned a woman’s fulfi llment in the housewife role that Sexton had been attempting to play to satisfy both her mother’s expectations and her own. Friedan’s book suggested that women’s mental health was in jeopardy from dutifully accepting a role that gave little outlet to their creativity.

For Discussion or Writing 1. What is the significance of the biblical allusion Sexton makes in referencing Jonah? How does knowing the Bible story contribute to your understanding Sexton’s suggestion about men’s relationships to their houses? 2. Read the first chapter of Betty Friedan’s controversial book The Feminine Mystique (available

online) and compare the ideas she presents with those in Sexton’s poem. 3. Compare Sexton’s tone in the phrase “That’s the main thing” with the narrator’s commentary sprinkled through “Cinderella,” published in Transformations (1970).

The Death of the Fathers (1962) The Death of the Fathers is a poem sequence published in 1962’s Book of Folly, which gives an overall impression of Sexton’s complex relationship with her father. It was written when Sexton was 42, 11 years after his death, and it reflects the poet’s complicated feelings about his place in her life. The man depicted in this sequence of memories is dashing, cruel, and repeatedly complicit in the loss of his daughter’s innocence. As she writes in section 4, though, he is not guilty alone: “we were conspirators, / secret actors.” Throughout the entire sequence, there is a sense of incestuous corruption that is being transferred from one generation to the next. The fi rst section, “Oysters,” recounts a time when, as she says, “the child was defeated.” Her childish reluctance to eat oysters is overcome under the tutelage of her martini-swigging father. His presence at “the death of [her] childhood” is causal. He has presented her with a challenge: “father-food” to consume. Her sensual, suggestive language re-creates the unappetizing task before her and leads to the center of the poem: “I swallowed.” As an initiation into her father’s secret society, eating oysters at the Union Oyster House represents for the narrator a loss of innocence and an acceptance, at 15, of the daughter’s familial and social roles. The second section, “How We Danced,” continues the narrator’s account of significant interactions with her father. She recalls dancing with her father at a family wedding. The images reinforce the couple’s intimacy; they “orbited” “like angels washing themselves,” “like two birds on fi re.” Her father leads—her role is to follow, of course—but after the center statement, “and we were dear, / very dear,” the images

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shift, and his presence is described as lurking, dangerous. In her memory, she dwells on the champagne they drank together and what was happening outside the intimate father zone. The crystal, the bride and groom, and her mother dancing with 20 men provide background for the intimacy-turned-assault of her father’s inappropriate physical desire: “the serpent, that mocker, woke up and pressed against me / like a great god and we bent together / like two lonely swans.” In “The Boat,” which follows, the young narrator captures vividly a close encounter with death in a speedboat being driven dangerously fast by her father. The father’s role is again destructive; he puts his family’s lives in danger. Sexton’s images are unexpected: She tumbles “like a loose kumquat,” and the occupants of the boat are “scissors” that cut through the sea. Colors and textures are memorable, including waves as boulders, the sea as a “pitiless” “green room.” With her, we hold our breath underwater (emphasized by repetition, “Under. Under. Under.”) until they surface. She knows that they have been “clasped” by a “cold wing,” but death holds no appeal for her at that age. “The dead are very close,” but she does not belong with them yet: “You have no business. / No business here.” “Santa” and “Friends” continue the recollections of times her father has failed her and chronicle the narrator’s descent into corruption. Images are increasingly sexual, emphasizing her physical pain as well as her emotional distance from her fatherprotector. The final, long section deals with Sexton’s concern that her father was not, indeed, her real father. In “Begat,” she tells the story of the “monster of doubt” that has arisen. Her images are sharp and biological, full of pain and disillusionment as she questions her conception, her history, and her identity.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the descriptive images in “Oysters.” How has Sexton conveyed her distaste as well as her delight to be part of her father’s world? 2. How do the word choices and sentence composition in “The Boat” provide an appropriate voice for describing the incident?

3. Compare the images that Sexton associates with her father with those with which Sylvia Plath portrays her own, in “Daddy.”

“The Starry Night” (1962) In “The Starry Night,” published in her second collection, All My Pretty Ones, Sexton relies on dazzling images to probe her desire to be incorporated into the divine. Crafting an evocative description of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous expressionistic painting, Sexton plays with the idea of death. As the poet’s was, Van Gogh’s life was tormented and ended in suicide. Including the quotation from Van Gogh’s letter, Sexton stresses a connection between the starry night and religion, between the heavens and Heaven. Her poetry often involves a religious quest, as well as a fascination with death; those themes combine here with a longing to control her own death, which she emphasizes in her twice-repeated phrase “This is how / I want to die.” After the final repetition, she elaborates on her desire for a death that is dramatic, natural, but somehow lacking in physicality—she wishes to be “sucked up” by some unseen divine force, to be pulled without fanfare or pain into the spinning star-fi lled night sky: “sucked up by that great dragon, to split / from my life with no flag, / no belly/ no cry.” Sexton’s images describe the movement and power of Van Gogh’s painting. For her, the silent, angularly drawn town is not important; it is the curling, coiling lines that she focuses on, for in the movement, she sees life and strength. The most prominent image in the foreground of the painting is the dark, waving vegetation that reaches up into the sky. Sexton finds it ominously personal: “one black haired tree slips up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.” She emphasizes heat: “The night boils with eleven stars.” She evokes an invisible authority that moves and controls the heavens—“The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars”—and gives the Moon godly attributes: it “bulges in its orange irons / to push children, like a god, from its eye.” Sexton’s style in this poem, as usual, is deliberately colloquial and accessible. In two simple six-line

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verses and one five-line extended sentence, she shows us her interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting and overlays it with her own longing to know spirituality and death. She depends on the use of short direct statements interspersed among complex descriptions: “The town is silent.” “It moves. They are all alive.” “This is how / I want to die.” Her many monosyllabic word choices effectively convey the sense of the painting, as well as her own quest for a physical and spiritual transformation.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare the painting by Van Gogh to Sexton’s poem that evokes it. You can find a copy of the painting at http://www.vangoghgallery.com/ painting/starrynight.html. 2. Read the poem aloud and listen for repetition of the sounds. What sound do you hear most? Does recognizing frequent sound repetition help you get a sense of the mood or meaning of the poem that otherwise might escape you?

“The Truth the Dead Know” (1962) “The Truth the Dead Know” is a poem Sexton wrote in response to the deaths of her parents, which occurred within three months of each other in 1959. It begins starkly, “Gone, I say and walk from the church,” and the theme of rigid, unchangeable death persists throughout the poem. When her loved ones have gone from her, the exhausted narrator leaves the scene, unwilling to follow meaningless funeral traditions. She rejects the conventional rites that surround the end of life, choosing to walk, rather than take the traditional, formal ride with the interment motorcade. She then escapes to the seashore, where she tries to take refuge in human contact while she numbly reflects on what it means to be dead, as well as what it means to be alive when both parents are gone. In this poem, the narrator recognizes and grapples fiercely with the hardest reality of living, our human mortality. “The Truth the Dead Know” is part of her second collection of poems, All My Pretty Ones, which, Sexton claimed later, were written to communicate

the causes of madness. Two significant deaths within a short time of each other crushed her spirit, threatening her always-fragile mental health. The narrator, despite trying to separate herself physically from the reality of death, finds it waiting for her in her refuge by the sea. She continues to be haunted by her parents’ deaths and the harsh afterlife she envisions for them. This poem is a good example of Sexton’s ability to write bare narrative lines, such as “I am tired of being brave,” that frankly convey her reaction to months of bearing witness to suffering. The poem shows her powerful use of imagery and controlled rhyme in a structured abab cdcd form. The images she chose for this poem are uniformly hard, reflecting the inflexibility of death, beginning with “the stiff procession” from the church. When she flees to the sea, it is not the soft Cape Cod summer seashore that we might expect, for “the sun gutters in the sky” and “the sea swings in like an iron gate.” Nature reflects her despair. The wind “falls in like stones,” reinforcing the depths of her grief, but she finds temporary comfort in the human touch, in the realization that “No one’s alone.” The hard images return as Sexton imagines her dead parents as stone bodies in stone boats, shoeless and without need of the formal blessings of the church, which cannot penetrate their rock surroundings anyway. Just as she has refused the “stiff procession” from the church, so they “refuse / to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.” No heavenly afterlife for them; they lie like stone, among stone, as the sea rocks beneath them. In this four-quatrain poem, the poet once more works to take control of extremely painful events in her life by forcing pattern and meaning on them. Her friend the poet Maxine Kumin recalls that this is one of the poems that Sexton revised repeatedly, working to streamline the language and cleanse it of biographical or sentimental details. Long-vowel rhymes such as cultivate and iron gate, more like stone and knucklebone, emphasize the finality and the unforgiving nature of death.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “The Truth the Dead Know” appeared in Sexton’s second collection of poems, All My Pretty

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Ones. Look up the literary allusion of the title phrase, examine its context, and relate it to the content of this poem. 2. Compare this poem with Sylvia Plath’s “Full Fathom Five” (http://www.angelfire.com/tn/ plath/ff5.html) and “All the Dead Dears” (http:// www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/dears.html). How are the ways the two poets envision the dead similar? Note how their styles and images and the tones of their narrators differ. Evaluate the effects of each of the poems on their audiences. 3. Compare the isolated afterlife Sexton foresees for her parents with that she describes for her mentor, the poet John Holmes, in “Somewhere in Africa.”

“Young” (1962) “Young,” published in All My Pretty Ones, views a nostalgic youthful memory through a lens of adult cynicism. The poem takes the shape of one long sensuous sentence, recollecting the child’s “brand new body / which was not a woman’s yet” lying on the grass looking up at the summer night sky, “a thousand doors ago.” Doors represent choices and changes; for the narrator, not just time, but opportunities have passed since she was an innocent child looking up into the night sky. In her privileged childhood summer existence on Squirrel Island, where she did indeed live in a “big house with four / garages,” young Anne Sexton must have experienced many such nights. As the narrator lies on the grass by herself, throwing questions up at the stars, Mother and Father have a background presence; they are remote and separate, not only from the lonely narrator, but also from each other. Mother is represented by her window: “a funnel / of yellow heat running out.” Her father’s window is “half-shut / an eye where sleepers pass.” The images associated with the parents reflect Sexton’s memory of her mother’s cold materialism and her father’s alcoholism, both of which caused her to feel isolated. Throughout the poem Sexton’s lines are short and filled with idyllic summer images such as clover wrinkling and crickets ticking. The theme of this

poem is innocence, but the innocence is unexpectedly mocked near the end of the poem-sentence. The narrative voice of the poem establishes a mood of carefree childish summer happiness that is challenged by her choice of words near the end: “thought God could really see.” The adult narrator has suddenly intruded, reflecting that she once was young enough to trust that “God could really see / the heat and the painted light.” Though the child had faith, the adult, looking back, knows that neither parents nor God was really able to see her. The distance between the child and the parents and between the child and the heavens reinforces the atmosphere of loneliness, for God turns out to be no more present than the parents. After that revelation, the narrator becomes the child again and finishes with her only rhyming line: “elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Examine the images in “Young.” How do they set the mood for the poem? Why is establishing such a mood important in order for the ending of the poem to be effective? 2. Contrast this poem with “Old,” also published in her book All My Pretty Ones, the collection of poems that Sexton later said were written to explain the causes of her madness. 3. Confessional poets seem to want their audiences to see the persona of the poem and writer as one and the same. Do you think the use of biographical details is limiting to the appeal of the poem, or do they enhance its impact?

“Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman” (1966) Sexton wrote “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman” for her daughter Linda’s, 11th birthday. In the poem, published as part of Sexton’s 1966 collection, Live or Die, she reflects with pride on the girl’s approaching physical maturation. While recalling her own confusing experience of puberty, she celebrates her daughter’s budding sexuality. Comparing the emerging woman to “an acre of yellow beans” they had once planted that turned out to

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be “too much” to consume, she creates a sequence of associations and advice. “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman” continues Sexton’s examination of the delineations between generations. The poet encourages her daughter to accept the changes puberty will introduce, to believe in newness, potential, and growth: “What I want to say, Linda, / is that there is nothing in your body that lies. / All that is new is telling the truth.” She acknowledges both closeness and distance between mother and daughter, suggesting that she wishes Linda to diverge from the path of self-doubt that has been modeled within the family. Remembering her own isolation at that age, when she “waited like a target,” and no one offered her guidance, the poet’s birthday gifts to her daughter are reassurance, solidarity, and advice: “Let your body in / let it tie you in / in comfort.” The calm counsel of her narrator/self stands in contrast to the persistent difficulties that the suicidal Sexton has had in accepting the continued existence of her own body. She encourages her daughter to embrace the woman’s life that awaits her, to be independent and secure. Yet, as did Sexton’s own mother, whose portrait hung in the family home on the wall opposite her own, the poet remains proudly, powerfully, perhaps threateningly, present in her daughter’s life: “I’m here. That somebody else, / an old tree in the background.” The age of 12—high noon, the “ghost hour”— signifies for the poet the time at which the girl child becomes available to men, who will scale walls to get to her. Sexton is not a conventionally protective mother whose vision of motherhood might include shielding Linda from the invading “men bare to the waist.” For the always-sensual Sexton, men belong there; they are a natural part of the landscape of young womanhood. Her main concern is not to preserve Linda’s sexual innocence but to reassure her daughter before the men arrive that she is strong: Her “bones are lovely.” The girl already has structures of strength and support within herself. Twice Sexton repeats, “What I want to say, Linda,” as if her meaning might be lost in the stunning array of images. She fills “Little Girl” with striking evocations of garden and of womb. Things that grow, that are full of sensuality, appear in each section: “mush-

rooms and garlic buds all engorged,” “apples beginning to swell,” “sprouts,” a glut of string beans. The imagery is lush with potential, a celebration of physical abundance. This poem, while delighting in life and its possibilities, ultimately blurs the lines between mother and daughter. Once again it becomes clear that in the mind of this poet, the older generation remains a powerful presence, for good or for ill, in its children.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Consider the tone of various sections of this poem. Does the speaker maintain a single attitude toward her subject throughout, or can you discern differences? 2. Why do you think Sexton scatters words and phrases in italics throughout the poem? How do your observations help you better understand the poem’s significance? 3. Audiences were often moved when Sexton read “Little Girl” in the presence of her daughter. Many heard it as a mother’s proud celebration of Linda’s life, while others found it more troubling. Read the poem carefully several times and compose an argument for a positive or a negative reading of the poem. 4. Read Sexton’s earlier poems “Housewife” and “The Double Image.” In what ways can you find thematic similarities? Are there significant differences in the poems’ resolutions?

“Somewhere in Africa” (1966) “Somewhere in Africa” is an elegy written to John Holmes, the Boston poet who had been one of Sexton’s first teachers and mentors. In his workshop she had learned the techniques that allowed her to harness the wild images of her unconscious mind. Yet, Holmes had discouraged her from publishing her first collection, viewing the poems as too intimate, too embarrassingly frank in their presentation of her madness. Holmes preferred a more conservative approach to poetry, one that depended on erudite literary allusions and traditional forms. Upon his death, in his honor, Sexton constructed one of her

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most formally wrought poems; “Somewhere in Africa” consists of seven quatrains of alternating end rhymes (abab cdcd) and one concluding couplet. The first four stanzas explore the conventions of death. As always, death is accompanied by regret for unaccomplished goals. Holmes’s work The Fortune Teller had been considered for the National Book Award in 1962, and he was very disappointed when the honor went to someone else, leaving his “last book unsung.” Holmes’s illness had spread very quickly, and his death had taken his friends by surprise. The narrator appears distressed both by the lack of anger that has accompanied the death and by the inadequate respect paid to him by a “windy preacher.” Sexton relies on the imagery of a garden to denote the growth and spread of the illness, “a dark thing.” She writes with the descriptive detail of lush and uncontrolled growth: “cancer blossomed in your throat, / rooted like bougainvillea into your gray backbone,” while “thick petals, the exotic reds, the purples and whites / covered up your nakedness.” For this poet, though, unable to be saved by science and “mourned as father and teacher,” death has the potential for a new and voluptuous life. In the final three stanzas and the couplet, Sexton develops her vision of eternal poetic life and shows her respect for her mentor, whom she represents as “stronger than mahogany” and “requiring twelve strong men” to row him into eternity. The authority of death is mitigated by the presence of a powerful woman god (“known but forbidden”) who can deliver the poet to a rich, exotic resting place: “a woman who will place you / upon her shallow boat, who is a woman naked to the waist / moist with palm oil and sweat, a woman of some virtue / and wild breasts, her limbs excellent, unbruised and chaste.” In her tightly structured homage to her mentor, Sexton has honored the convention of the river entrance to the eternity, but she has altered the gender of the traditional gods of the afterlife. Holmes, who could not approve of her untamed poetic expression, will doubtless be surprised to find the sensual, untamed goddess Sexton has willed to await him. The final couplet invests the dead poet with gravity and value (“cut from a single tree”) and sends him

off into a new life of well-deserved riches “down the river with the ivory, the copra and the gold,” borne there by 12 strong men and one fearless, forbidden woman.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Consider Sexton’s use of Africa in this poem. Why do you think she chose this mythical setting for her elegy to a Boston poet? 2. Compare the vision of death that Sexton created in “The Truth the Dead Know” with the fate that awaits the deceased John Holmes. 3. Holmes’s objections to her intimate poems led Sexton to write a defense of the style that would become known as confessional. Read “To John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further,” and compare the form she is defending to the style of “Somewhere in Africa.”

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON SEXTON AND HER WORK 1. Poems from Sexton’s first two collections demonstrate her concern with writing to strict forms and what she called “tricks” of technique. Contrast “Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn” and “The Double Image” with the structures of some of her later poems, for example, The Death of the Fathers and others from The Book of Folly. 2. Sylvia Plath credited Sexton for influencing her away from the abstraction of her early poems into the concrete and personal. Examine Plath’s early poem “Lament” and compare the language and form to Sexton’s poem, also called “Lament,” or to Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” both published in 1962. Where do you see the greatest emphasis on sound, meter, and image? How do the choices the poets made affect theme and audience? 3. Pick at least two themes with which Sexton is associated (religious quest, transformation of myth, father-daughter and mother-daughter relationships, madness, the meaning of death, and issues of female identity) and trace them in several poems. How are the themes interrelated?

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4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “The Poet,” wrote, “The experience of each new age requires a new confession.” Discuss what “confessional” poetry is. In which of Sexton’s poems do you see the most evidence that she fits into this school? 5. Compare “Man and Wife,” from Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (winner of the National Book Award in 1959), with Sexton’s 1963 poem named “Man and Wife.” What similarities and differences do you see between the two poems? 6. Robert Lowell referred to his writing before Life Studies as “cooked,” meaning it was formal and impersonal, while the new way of writing he was exploring in the late 1950s was “raw” and painfully personal. Life Studies is credited with starting the confessional movement in poetry. Identify the raw elements of Lowell’s and Sexton’s poetry, and discuss why the confessional way of writing might have offended their audiences. What do you think they hoped to gain by sharing such raw information with the public? Do you think the creation of art requires some reshaping and “cooking”? Point to specific poems by Sexton, Lowell, and Sylvia Plath to support your conclusions. 7. Another woman from New England who wrote poetry about her life and observations, her religious strivings and doubts, and the presence of death in life was Emily Dickinson. Compare Dickinson’s “Much madness is divinest sense” with Sexton’s “Her Kind” and/or Dickinson’s “Faith Is a fine invention” with Sexton’s “The Poet of Ignorance” from her posthumous collection The Awful Rowing toward God. 8. Sexton’s images are central to her poetry, and she occasionally called herself an “imagist.” Compare her poems “The Kite” and “Ghosts” to William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” and Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” two examples of the early-20th-century imagist movement. Do you think Sexton demonstrates their poetic principles sufficiently to be classified with them? 9. Read some of Sexton’s poem adaptations of the Grimms’ fairy tales, published in 1971 as

Transformations. How does her use of images from popular culture both enhance the impact of her interpretations of the tales and, perhaps, distance a 21st-century reader from them? 10. The women’s movement created the opportunity for women to write about issues that had not traditionally been themes of poetry, including the frustrations some women felt in their roles as wives and mothers. Compare some of the poems about motherhood written by Sexton (such as “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman”) with those of Audre Lorde (“The Woman Thing,” “Black Mother Woman”) and Sylvia Plath (“Morning Song”). How does this group of contemporary women poets represent mothering? 11. Another contemporary of Sexton’s is the poet Adrienne Rich, with whom she shares themes identified as “feminist.” They both wrote explicitly about the experiences of women and their own identities as women artists. Read Rich’s poem “Integrity” and Sexton’s poem “Her Kind,” and compare the ways in which the narrator defi nes herself in each one. 12. Sexton enjoyed the role of storyteller; many of her poems (“Some Foreign Letters,” “The Double Image,” “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward”) can be described as dramatic narratives with characters, scenes, and a story to tell. Read other dramatic narrative poems, such as Robert Frost’s “Home Burial,” and look for similarities and differences in language, images, composition, and effect. WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES “Anne Sexton.” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/ poets/s_z/sexton/sexton.htm. Accessed May 21, 2007. “Anne Sexton.” Poets.org. Available online. URL: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/14. Accessed by May 21, 2007. Cam, Heather. “Sylvia Plath’s Debt to Anne Sexton.” American Literature 59, no. 3. (October 1987): 429–432.

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Colburn, Steven E., ed. Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. ———. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose of Anne Sexton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. Davison, Peter. “A New Skin: Anne Sexton, 1956– 1961.” In The Fading Smile. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Gallagher, Brian. “The Expanded Use of Simile in Anne Sexton’s Transformations.” Notes on Modern American Literature 3 (Summer 1979): 9–13. George, Diana Hume. Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. George, Diana Hume, ed. Sexton: Selected Criticism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Anne Sexton. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Harrison, B. G. “The Dead Poetess Society.” Mademoiselle 97 (December 1991): 80. Hoffmann, Nancy Jo. “Reading Women’s Poetry: The Meaning and Our Lives.” College English 34 (October 1972): 48–62. Jones, A. R. “Necessity and Freedom: The Poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.” Critical Quarterly 6 (Spring 1965): 11–30. Juhasz, Susanne. “‘The Excitable Gift’: The Poetry of Anne Sexton.” In Naked and Fiery Forms, Modern American Poetry by Women, a New Tradition. New York: Octagon Books, 1978. Markey, Janice. A New Tradition? The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich: A Study of Feminism and Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. McClatchy, J. D., ed. Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

McGill, W. J. “Anne Sexton and God.” Commonweal 104 (May 13, 1977): 304–306. Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. ———. “Housewife into Poet: The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton.” New England Quarterly 56, no. 4 (December 1983): 483–503. Mills, Ralph J. Creation’s Very Self: On the Personal Element in Recent American Poetry. Fort Worth, Tex.: Texas Christian University, 1969, 33–34. ———. “A Note on the Personal Element in Recent American Poetry.” Chicago Circle Studies 1 (December 1965): 7–11. Morton, Richard E. Anne Sexton’s Poetry of Redemption: The Chronology of a Pilgrimage. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989. Northouse, Cameron, and Thomas P. Walsh. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1974. Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Sexton, Linda Gray. “A Daughter’s Story: I Knew Her Best.” New York Times Book Review, 18 August 1991, p. 20. Sexton, Linda Gray, and Lois Ames, eds. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Vendler, Helen. “Anne Sexton.” In The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Wagner-Martin, Linda W., ed. Critical Essays on Anne Sexton. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

Eileen Crowe

May Swenson (1913–1989) What is the experience of poetry? Choosing to analyze this experience for myself after an engrossment of many years, I see it based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. (“The Poet as Anti-Specialist”)

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ccording to Harold Bloom, the influential American literary critic and scholar, the poet May Swenson ranks with Marianne Moore and ELIZABETH BISHOP as one of the three top women poets of the 20th century, and her impressive publication record and list of literary awards reinforce Bloom’s assertion, in spite of its sexist overtones, (275). During her lifetime Swenson’s poems were published in Antaeus, the Atlantic Monthly, Carleton Miscellany, the Nation, the New Yorker, Paris Review, Parnassus, and Poetry. She received numerous grants and fellowships, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Poet-Playwright Grant, an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and a MacArthur Fellowship. To say that Swenson’s subject matter was wide and varied does not begin to describe the depth and visual clarity with which she approached the world. Some of her poems might be categorized by readers unfamiliar with her work into simple groupings labeled space, science, sound, sex, and sports, but all of her poems address human nature, invention, and the natural world, themes that she reveled in exploring. Born to pioneering parents, May Swenson was the first child of Margaret Hellberg and Dan Arthur Swenson, who were immigrants from Sweden and converts to the Mormon religion. Dan Swenson immigrated to America in 1894, and after returning

to Sweden to serve a Mormon mission, he met Margaret Hellberg in church. The two were married on August 21, 1912. Margaret and Dan decided to start their family right away, and on May 28, 1913, Anna Thilda May Swenson was born in Logan, Utah. In Swenson’s earlier publications, scholars of her work will frequently encounter conflicting data that report her birth in 1919, an error that was of Swenson’s own making. She wanted publishers, readers, and her peers to believe that she was younger than she actually was, and so she simply shaved off six years and reported her birth year as 1919. May was the first of the Swensons’ 10 children, and as were many first-born daughters, she was expected to help with the laundry, the housework, and the cooking. Her father even installed a low sink in the kitchen so the children could help with the dishes. May preferred the outdoor work in the family’s garden and orchard, but her childhood was not composed entirely of work. May’s childhood friends remember that she spent hours alone reading, but they also remember jumping rope with her and playing games like jacks and kick the can. At about the age of 12, May began to keep a journal. “One day, May showed a page to her older cousin Edna—nicknamed ‘Sunny’—who read the page aloud, noticed that the sentences scanned, and remarked that May was writing poetry in her diary” (Knudson and Bigelow 27). Although that moment in May’s childhood is often described as the first time anyone called her

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a poet, she had known that she wanted to be a writer much earlier than that. A biographical note in Utah Sings (1934), one of Swenson’s earliest publications, quotes her as saying, “I determined to be a writer when I was seven years old” (274). Storytelling was another of Swenson’s early literary talents. Her siblings remember her making up stories about the family and telling them while she cut their hair and scrubbed the floors. Swenson’s fi rst publication was the result of a contest at Logan High School. Her short story called “Christmas Day” won the Vernon Short Story Medal, $25, and a place in the school’s newspaper, the Grizzly, in 1929. After high school, Swenson followed in her father’s footsteps by enrolling at Utah State Agricultural College (USAC), where she wrote for the campus newspaper Student Life. By her junior year Swenson had her own humor column in Student Life, which she called “Station Hooey: Over the U.S.A.C. Nutwork.” The logo for her column depicted a winking gentleman in a suit coat and tie, with shiny black hair parted in the middle and slicked back, in front of a round radio-broadcasting microphone. The tone and humor in “Station Hooey” would have reminded college students at USAC of contemporary radio programs. Swenson also contributed to the Scribble, the campus literary magazine, where her fi rst poem, “Three Hues of Melody” was published in 1932. It was through her association with the Scribble that Swenson met and formed lasting friendships with a creative and engaging community of writers, including Edith Welch, who became Swenson’s closest friend at USAC; Austin Fife, who became a well-known folklorist; Ray B. West, Jr., who would eventually found the Rocky Mountain Review and publish some of Swenson’s poetry; and the poets Veneta Nielsen and Grant Redford, who both went on to become English professors. Nielsen and Redford kept in touch with Swenson and often read her published work to their classes. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree from SAG, Swenson spent a little time writing for the Herald, the local Logan newspaper, but quickly persuaded her parents to let her move to Salt Lake City to live with her cousin Sunny. Swenson found work in the

advertising department for a newspaper there, but by 1936, she knew she had to leave Utah in order to make her own way. This time she convinced her parents to let her travel with Sunny, who was on her way to pick up a new car. Swenson borrowed $200 from her parents to pay for the “vacation,” which they had lent willingly because she had not told them about her real plan. Sunny and May boarded the Greyhound bus intending to stop in Michigan for the new car and then drive on to New York. Although Sunny was only going for a visit, May planned to stay. In the late 1930s, the United States was fully immersed in the Great Depression, and as Swenson settled in to life in New York City, she realized that she would not be able to find work as a newspaper reporter. Instead, “May advertised as a writer’s helper, and after many interviews with ‘crackpots’ she found ‘bosses’ who paid her small sums as an editor and ghostwriter” (Knudson and Bigelow 39). Swenson accepted one of these positions with Anzia Yezierska, whose fiction from the 1920s had been successful enough to be made into fi lm. However, Yezierska was also struggling financially and was unable to offer much of a salary. She introduced Swenson to her nephew, Arnold Kates, who worked in advertising and had a large apartment. In order to make ends meet, Swenson cleaned his apartment. Swenson was too proud to ask her family for help, and she rejected Yezierska’s suggestion that she marry Kates as a solution her financial problems. Instead, Swenson applied for a job with the Federal Writers Project. In order to be eligible for this program, artists had to be “indigent” and receiving welfare, and so she had to lie. Swenson claimed that she had no relatives, no insurance, no money, and no one to support her, even though she knew her father would have been able to help her if he had known about her circumstances. Swenson was accepted into the program and was able to work for a year before her lie was discovered. She worked with the Living Lore Unit of the Federal Writers Project interviewing working-class people in New York City. Swenson lost her job with the project when a relief worker discovered that she had lied on her application. She worked for a while with the United States Travel Bureau, but when the war

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began, travel decreased and Swenson soon found herself out of work again. Swenson’s next employment opportunity was as a typist with the Federal Wholesale Druggists’ Association, where she was employed for the next eight years (1942–49). She accepted this position with the intention of finding a way to utilize her writing skills. She wrote news releases, letters, and convention speeches and eventually became the editor of the Federal Pharmacist and the Federal News Capsule, which were two industry publications. At this job she earned $75 per week, and by the time she decided to take a year off to write, she had saved $1,000 from her salary. The goal was to have her poetry published, and she knew that meant two things: spending a great deal of time writing and tackling the “messy business” of making contacts in the publishing world (Knudson and Bigelow 56). As a member of the Raven Poetry Club, Swenson had already met Alfred Kreymborg, a friend who shared her love of chess. Kreymborg had been the president of the Poetry Society of America from 1943 to 1945 and had been instrumental in helping poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams gain recognition. On January 26, 1949, Swenson invited Kreymborg to tea, asking him to suggest influential magazines where she might submit her work. At tea, Swenson asked him whether he would be willing to recommend her and her poetry to some of these editors. The result of this meeting took the form of a letter dated February 9, 1949, from William Rose Benet, one of the editors of the Saturday Review of Literature. It reads: “Mr. Kreymborg spoke to me about you, and I am glad that you sent in your poems. I like the ones called ‘Haymaking’ and ‘Goodnight,’ and am showing them to the other editors” (Knudson and Bigelow 56). Swenson’s fi rst breakthrough occurred the same year with the publication of “Haymaking” in the Saturday Review of Literature along with the publication of a group of poems in New Directions in Prose and Poetry. Swenson’s poetry was featured alongside the works of authors such as Henry Miller, Jean Genet, and Jorge Luis Borges, all controversial and experimental writers, because James Laughlin, her editor at New Direc-

tions, was interested in publishing literature that moved in “new directions.” Many doors of opportunity opened to Swenson after the publication of her poems. In fall 1950 she received an invitation to Yaddo, a residence and retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, for artists, writers, and composers, where she met the poet ELIZABETH BISHOP. They cultivated a lifelong friendship through correspondence, beginning with a letter dated December 12, 1950, in which Swenson invited Bishop to visit her in Greenwich Village over Christmas. Although Bishop declined the invitation, the two continued to write more than 200 letters over a 29-year period, the breadth and depth of which Gardner McFall has called a “vast correspondence . . . between supplicant and master” (McFall 5). It is clear from their letters that the two poets admired each other’s work, and it is common to find one offering comments on the other’s drafts. In their initial correspondence, Bishop often positioned herself as the mentor, and Swenson’s grateful tone reinforces that notion. As their communication progressed, however, Swenson gained ground and their letters began to sound like correspondence between two equals. By the mid-1950s Swenson took a part-time job with James Laughlin at New Directions reading manuscript submissions. She worked there for 12 years and was also “chief writer of rejection letters” (Knudson and Bigelow 57), a task that must have been difficult for someone accustomed to receiving them herself. Swenson had received eight rejections from Howard Moss, editor at the New Yorker, for example, before he called in 1952 to accept her poem “By Morning.” Swenson’s next major accomplishment was the acceptance of her first collection of poetry, Another Animal. The correspondence from John Hall Wheelock, an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, arrived on May 28, 1953. She was delighted by his letter, which congratulated her on the quality and originality of her poetry, in part because Wheelock himself was a poet. Swenson replied immediately, “I hope that when I next see you I can tell you what a great delight your letter brought—it came on my birthday” (Knudson and Bigelow 59). Swenson was 40 years old.

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Over the next 10 years, Swenson would take short-term and part-time jobs as a typist and dictaphone operator so that she would be free to quit and write poetry. She made it a practice to save parts of her salary until she had enough to retreat again at Yaddo or MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, another artist’s retreat. During these retreats Swenson was able to engage with a vibrant community of artists. At Yaddo, Swenson attended regular séances with Ted Hughes and SYLVIA PLATH, in which she helped them “tip the table,” an experience that inspired her poem “The Fingers.” She played chess with Marcel Duchamp and sat for portraits with numerous artists, including Beauford Delaney, whose portrait of Swenson now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Other friendships included the composer Ruth Anderson, the biographer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, the poet Louise Bogan, and the artist Milton Avery. In 1957 Swenson left another job to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, in part because the poet John Ciardi had named her the Robert Frost Fellow that year. She hoped the conference would be an opportunity to fi nd an editor for her new collection, A Cage of Spines. She also planned to meet Robert Frost, who she hoped might even like her poetry. Although she was able to have a short interview with Frost, his response to her book was to say simply that it “reeks with poetry,” a response that puzzled Swenson. She writes, “He said no more. His handsome old face had an impassive ruffian look. . . . Ponderously he stood up. And I never did fi nd out what he meant. I was too paralyzed to ask” (Knudson and Bigelow 68). At Bread Loaf that summer Swenson made another friend, Alma Routsong, who later asked her to read a manuscript called Patience and Sarah, which eventually became a classic but was not being published despite Alma’s efforts. Swenson loved the novel and encouraged Alma not to give up. Another result of Swenson’s efforts at Bread Loaf was the 1958 publication of her second book, A Cage of Spines. In 1959 she began a reading tour of college campuses, which included a homecoming and reading in Logan, Utah. Swenson was surprised to find that she enjoyed reading for large groups in

Logan, because she was often very nervous before public readings. To overcome her fear she would practice her poems aloud, recording them over and over again into a tape recorder. Swenson continued to travel and do public readings in order to supplement her meager income. Finally, Swenson was able to quit the reading circuit and take a leave from her job at New Directions when she won a Guggenheim Foundation grant and an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. In 1960 Swenson and her companion, Pearl Schwartz, used the money to purchase camping gear and a French car and camped their way through Italy, Spain, and France. Swenson’s poetry during this time reflects on both the natural and the artistic beauty that she encountered in Europe. From 1959 to 1966 Swenson served as editor at New Directions. In 1965 she won a theater-association grant from the Ford Foundation, which enabled her to spend a year doing research and writing a play. She read her favorite playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, among others, and attended rehearsals of The Changeling to learn from the director Elia Kazan. Swenson’s play The Floor was the result of her year-long efforts; as a comedy of the absurd that deals specifically with time and space, it clearly reflects the influence of both Beckett and Ionesco. During the academic year of 1966–67 Swenson accepted a position as a writer in residence at Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana. Her salary was $20,000 for teaching 12 students once a week. It was an opportunity she could not pass up, despite her fear of teaching. During her time at Purdue she met a fellow faculty member, Rozanne Knudson, who shared her love of poetry. “Zan” introduced her to the world of sports, and in turn, Swenson introduced Zan to a birder’s perspective. The two women shared a chemistry and camaraderie that evolved into a loving life partnership. Swenson wrote several sporting poems, such as “Analysis of Baseball” and “Watching the Jets Lose to Buffalo at Shea” as a result of Zan’s affinity for sporting events. At the end of her year at Purdue, Swenson and Knudson purchased a summer home together in Sea Cliff, Long Island. Swenson nicknamed the house “Kestrel’s Nest” after iden-

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tifying a hawk that lived nearby. A series of nature and water poems were inspired by the views from Sea Cliff; Swenson could see the Long Island Sound from every room. The 1970s gave Swenson some new and interesting challenges. Swenson’s first language was Swedish, and in the 1960s a Bollingen Foundation prize had sponsored her translation of the Swedish poets Ingemar Gustafson, Werner Aspenström, Eric Lindegren, Gunnar Ekelöf, Harry Martinson, and Karin Boye, which Swenson included in her 1967 collection called Half Sun Half Sleep. In the early 1970s the University of Pittsburgh Press asked her to translate a collection by Tomas Tranströmer, a noted Swedish poet, for an American audience. Swenson enjoyed the challenge and thought of the work as a kind of puzzle to be solved. At the same time Swenson’s science poems were being recognized. She was delighted to be included in anthologies that placed her work beside the likes of Sir Isaac Newton, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and James D. Watson. Although Swenson never enjoyed public speaking, she did accept short teaching assignments at the University of Lethbridge in Canada; at the University of California, Riverside; and at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. In the early 1980s Swenson was named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 1981 she received Yale’s Bollingen Prize for poetry, joining the ranks of previous winners such as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost. Swenson often took refuge each spring and autumn in a house in Bethany Beach, Delaware, where she was able to escape the social pressures that were continuing to encroach on her writing time. In 1987 she returned to Logan, Utah, to receive an honorary doctorate from Utah State University. While she was in Logan, Swenson received word that she had been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in the amount of $380,000. She gave each of her brothers and sisters a $3,000 “Swenson Fellowship” in celebration. In 1989 Swenson observed her 76th birthday during a family reunion in Utah. She was tired from the asthma attacks she had experienced on her recent trip to the University of Washington in Seattle, where she had just given the THEODORE ROETHKE reading,

but she decided to go ahead with plans for a family dinner on her return trip to Sea Cliff. It was the last time she would be with all of her family in Utah. She treated the Swenson clan to an expensive meal at a French restaurant and presented each member with a copy of a new poem she had written for them called “Night Visits with the Family II.” In December 1989 Swenson and Knudson moved to their winter residence in Ocean View, Delaware, the “large house” that Swenson refers to in her poem “Last Day.” The first few lines are contemplative and the imagery indicates that Swenson was aware she was nearing the end of her life: I’m having a sunbath on the rug alone in a large house facing south. A tall window admits a golden trough the length of a coffin in which I lie in December, the last day of the year. (Knudson and Bigelow 123)

Swenson died of a heart attack on December 4, 1989, the result of high blood pressure and severe asthma. During her lifetime she had published 11 volumes of poetry and received numerous awards and extensive recognition for her work.

“By Morning” (1952) This poem was the fi rst of 59 poems Swenson would publish with Howard Moss and the New Yorker over 38 years. “By Morning” is one of Swenson’s early shape poems, an experimentation in which she uses white space or capitalization to give a poem a unique shape or form. She explains in a note from Iconographs, a collection of her shape poems, that her intention was to “cause an instant object-to-eyeencounter with each poem before it is read wordfor-word. To have simultaneity as well as sequence. To make an existence in space, as well as time, for the poem.” “By Morning” is also one of Swenson’s riddle poems, which fl irt with meaning rather than facing it directly. These riddle poems are evocative and playful; they invite the reader to guess at the subject matter with the hints Swenson provides. The

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first two stanzas of “By Morning” abandon punctuation entirely and utilize quirky spacing to hint at a specific, fluttery kind of weather: Some for everyone plenty and more coming Fresh dainty airily arriving everywhere at once.

Although the spaces and repetition clearly suggest a breathy, tumbling type of precipitation, Moss believed that readers might not fully understand the concept of a riddling poem, and so he asked whether Swenson would be willing to publish it with a different title. She agreed because she was delighted at the prospect of seeing “Snow by Morning” in the New Yorker’s prominent literary pages. Swenson uses an obvious metaphor for snow, the imagery of a blanket, but then makes it fresh again by allowing the blanket magically to change the city into a more rural and pastoral landscape, where Streets will be fields cars be fumbling sheep A deep bright harvest will be seeded in a night.

“By Morning” is a celebratory poem that acknowledges the playful power of nature to soften the hard edges of both the city and its inhabitants. By morning, Swenson concludes, “we’ll be children / feeding on manna / a new loaf on every doorsill.”

mon and familiar subject seem new by looking at it with a fresh perspective. 2. Read the full text of Swenson’s poem “By Morning,” and compare or contrast it to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Snow Storm” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “It Sifts from Leaden Sieves” circa 1862. Identify the central images in each poem and be prepared to discuss the differences in stance, style, and tone that each author employs.

“Deciding” (1954) There is an underlying sexuality in the poem “Deciding,” which is a casual discussion and acceptance of both Swenson’s gender identity and society’s opinion of her sexual orientation. The poet Mark Doty observes that one of Swenson’s techniques is her playfulness, where she “is not only hiding in plain sight, but flaunting, as they used to say, a celebration of sexual pleasure” (95). Swenson originally published the poem “Deciding” under the heading “Part 2: Targets in the Brain” in her collection A Cage of Spines, a clear indication that this topic was on her mind. She later collected “Deciding” as a “Riddling Poem” in the 1963 collection To Mix with Time, a volume that preceded Swenson’s Poems to Solve by three years. Perhaps Swenson was not quite ready for “Deciding” to be solved; perhaps she preferred that her sexual orientation remain a riddle. When Nature: Poems Old and New was published posthumously in 2000, “Deciding” was fi nally collected under the grouping “Selves.” This celebratory “coming-out” poem playfully asks readers to consider lesbian sexuality as a delightful romp, while we reflect on the emerging lesbian as potato:

For Discussion or Writing 1. Spend some time outdoors observing nature. Identify a common natural phenomenon or a familiar animal as the subject and attempt your own shape or riddle poem. Pay particular attention to your description and try to make the com-

Deciding to go on digging doing it what they said outside wasn’t any use inside hiding it made it get ambitious like a potato in a dark bin it grew white grabbers for light

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out of its navel-eyes not priding itself much just deciding. (Swenson, A Cage of Spines 56)

However, Swenson does not necessarily want her readers to forget that “hiding it made it get ambitious,” a line that could be read as either cautionary or celebratory. “Deciding” is a decidedly open-ended poem. The lack of punctuation throughout the poem and the potential for readers to base meaning on their own insertions of a pause where commas and periods might be allude to this open-endedness. A reader might scan the first line and read it in this way: Deciding to go on, digging, doing it,” which suggests a kind of plodding persistence. Or, another reader might scan the first line like this: “Deciding to go on! Digging, doing it.” which is a reading that sounds much more hopeful. Finally, Swenson may have been playing around with the potato metaphor and the “Beat generation’s” definition of digging it with the following reading of the first line: “Deciding! To go on digging doing it.” To dig it meant to “like, enjoy, or take pleasure in” something, in this case “doing it,” which is an obvious, if a bit juvenile, reference to sex. By leaving out the punctuation, Swenson does not make any decisions for her readers; in fact, she does not ever conclusively “decide” that coming out is the best option, even for herself. Swenson is deciding that despite the “outside thumps” and societal pressure to conform to stereotypical gender roles that she has seriously considered, she is “going to go on digging doing it,” but she allows her readers to make their own decisions.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Review the entire text of Swenson’s poem “Deciding.” As a writing exercise, add your own punctuation to the poem and then read it aloud. Compare your version to two other students’ and analyze the differences in meaning. 2. Consider the effect of the “outside thumps” that the speaker of the poem describes in the middle stanza. What roles do discouragement and imagination play in your life? Write your own poem or creative nonfiction essay exploring these topics.

“Question” (1954) “Question” originally appeared in Swenson’s fi rst collection of poetry, Another Animal, published in 1954 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. As the title of the book implies, Swenson was interested in the interaction and similarities between animal and human worlds. In the fi rst stanza Swenson addresses her own body directly, calling it “my house / my horse my hound,” and asks the ultimate question about death: “what will I do / when you are fallen”? The metaphor of the body as a house for the soul would have been familiar religious imagery to Swenson, because it would not have been uncommon for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to understand the self as both separate from and part of the physical human body. However, Swenson’s next line, “my horse my hound,” complicates the metaphor. The poem begins as a loving and laudatory song but moves quickly into a nervous and fearful plea. The next stanza is concerned primarily with the action of a living body, and the language in the second stanza is parallel to the fi rst. “Where will I sleep” is a direct question for “Body my house,” and “How will I ride / What will I hunt” are queries for “my horse my hound.” In this poem Swenson uses all the question words in an interesting pattern. When separated from the rest of the poem, the plea becomes more pronounced and intense: what where how what where how how how. The only question in this poem that is not a question is when. Swenson’s use of the word makes it clear that the speaker in the poem knows that death is inevitable. The timing of the event is not the most important detail; rather, “how will it be” and “how will I hide” are of the utmost concern. If the central question of this poem is seeking to identify the self— what is it? where is it?—then Swenson asks the reader to consider what it means when “Body my good / bright dog is dead”? The fourth stanza imaginatively suggests that shedding our bodies might be a liberating experience: “How will it be / to lie in the sky / without roof or door / and wind for eye,” but the final two lines worry: “With cloud for a shift / how will I hide?” The speaker also fears that a loss of the body

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might simply leave her self naked and exposed. The only punctuation found in the poem is a question mark after the final line.

For Discussion or Writing 1. After reading Swenson’s “Question,” read Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” and consider the delight and doubt about the human body that are contained in both poems. Write an essay informed by these two poems that considers how gender identity might influence delight or doubt in adolescent body images. 2. In small groups, discuss life’s biggest questions; identify what they are, where they will affect you, and how you intend to answer them.

the little girl returns from her adventures, her mother asks what she has been doing because of her startling appearance: The child is a mess. She does not look neat and clean, as a girl should. Her hair is out of place and her dress is stretched out from the weight of the jackknife in her pocket. Although the mother in this poem tells her daughter to “go tie back your hair,” she also does not scold her for playing too roughly. This poem playfully and joyfully allows the young girl to “try on” the different identities of both horse and boy, suggesting, through the imagery of a centaur, that a nice balance between the characteristics of human and animal, male and female, might be able to coexist peacefully in one child’s personality and might even be acceptable to a concerned mother.

For Discussion or Writing

“The Centaur” (1954) This poem is an imaginative description of a 10-yearold child’s summer activities. A recurring theme in Swenson’s poetry is the fusing of animal and human behavior to illuminate her reader’s understanding of both worlds, and “The Centaur” is a perfect example of how these metaphors work in her poetry. The poem begins with a child who goes out to play in a willow grove. She cuts a willow with her brother’s jackknife and fashions it into “a long, limber horse / with a good thick knob for a head” and “a few leaves for the tail.” She cinches her brother’s belt “around his head for a rein” and then goes riding. As her play intensifies, she imagines herself as “the horse and the rider, / and the leather I slapped to his rump / spanked my own behind.” At this moment, the reader begins to see the significance of this poem’s title clearly. But the poem is about more than a simple summer afternoon. Because the speaker in the poem is wearing a dress, we understand that she is, indeed, female. But, the imagery throughout the poem underscores her desire to be more like her brother. She has his belt and his jackknife, and she takes pleasure in riding the willow as it jounces between her thighs. In this poem Swenson is engaging in a playful dialogue that challenges conventional gender roles. But, when

1. Write a poem about a specific childhood memory from which a larger meaning can be extrapolated. Use specific imagery like feelings, sounds, smells, textures, and even taste. 2. After reading “The Centaur,” read also “The Ballad of the Light-Eyed Little Girl” by GWENDOLYN BROOKS, “My Lost Youth” by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, “There Was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman, and “Rough” by Stephen Spender. Compare and contrast the different poetic forms found in these five poems with similar subject matter. 3. Ezra Pound said: “Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties.” Swenson quoted this passage in an article called “The Poet as Anti-Specialist.” How does this illuminate your reading of “The Centaur”?

“Water Picture” (1955) This poem first appeared in Swenson’s second collection of poetry, A Cage of Spines, published in 1958, and was collected again in a number of her subsequent publications, including To Mix with Time and Poems to Solve. The fact that “Water Picture” was collected so many times may indicate that it was one

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of Swenson’s favorites. This poem is about imagery and reflection; it is an observation of nature and one of Swenson’s many riddle poems. The four stanzas are rich with repetition and alliteration, which highlight the fact that in this poem, all of the images are doubled and upside down. The poem begins with “In the pond in the park / all things are doubled:” and launches into a lyrical description of a world turned on its head. “Dogs go by, / barking on their backs,” and “A flag / wags like a fishhook/ down there in the sky.” Although readers are familiar with seeing reflections in water, Swenson’s descriptions of the common landscape in a park seem both strange and silly. In a world where “A baby, taken to feed the / ducks, dangles upsidedown, / a pink balloon for a buoy,” and where “Treetops deploy a haze of / cherry bloom for roots,” it is comforting to observe a swan fondly kissing herself, ultimately splintering the ridiculousness of a reflected reality. The absurdity of the imagery in Swenson’s “Water Picture” serves to remind her readers that the love of one’s self is more important than the perception of others.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compose an artistic photograph of yourself with the intention of giving it the title “SelfRepresentation.” Discuss or write about the way you choose to represent yourself to the world in this photograph by answering the following questions. (a) What composition choices did you make? (b) Are they the same or different from the ways in which you represent yourself daily? (c) If you choose to share this photo with others, will they be surprised? (d) How would you like to be categorized?

“The Truth Is Forced” (1961) This poem, which Swenson began in 1961, was not published until 2000, when it appeared posthumously in a volume of poetry called Nature: Poems Old and New. “The Truth Is Forced” is a playfully

honest and yet completely suggestive poem and has since intrigued and engaged new Swenson scholars as the poem that reveals the most of Swenson’s own self. The fact that she wrote this poem and also chose not to publish it during her lifetime is especially tantalizing. In the first few lines, Swenson engages her readers in what amounts to a poetic striptease: Not able to be honest in person I wish to be honest in poetry. Speaking to you, eye to eye, I lie because I cannot bear to be conspicuous with the truth. Saying it—all of it—would be taking off my clothes. (Swenson, Nature 11–12)

As does any striptease, the poem hints that there is more to reveal about the speaker’s identity. It is easy to read this poem as Swenson’s own musings about her craft and her “most precious properties: / distance, secrecy, privacy” because of the decision she made to keep her sexual orientation private. The poet Mark Doty agrees and validates Swenson’s need for mystery. He says: “Naked directness, unadorned, sanitized, tends to work against desire; the power of Eros often lies in what is withheld, at least for awhile.” After all, he argues, “What is less sexy than a nudist camp?” (92). In the second stanza of “The Truth Is Forced,” Swenson acknowledges the duplicity of using words to obscure meaning. She realizes that her sensuous, wordy game of hide and seek will only make her readers look harder for what is hidden and she admits that: One must be honest somewhere. I wish to be honest in poetry. With the written word. Where I can say and cross out and say over and say around and say on top of and say in between and say in symbol, in riddle, in double meaning, under masks of any feature, in the skins of every creature.

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And in my own skin, naked. I am glad, indeed I dearly crave to become naked in poetry, . . . (Swenson, Nature 11–12)

These lines are suggestive and at the same time revealing. While they are obviously discussing poetry and her delight in wordplay, they also illuminate possible reasons for her decision to become a poet. Swenson wanted desperately to find meaning in the truth and lay it bare. “By leaving the core of things unvoiced” she offers “a dummy” in place of herself. And yet, she argues in the fi nal lines, “to force the truth / through a poem” will eventually lead to a greater understanding; when two people looking eye to eye can tell “me / and then you” the whole truth with their whole selves.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Emily Dickinson’s poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” and compare it to Swenson’s poem “The Truth Is Forced.” In a persuasive essay explore the implications of telling the truth gradually; is honesty always the best policy? Convince your audience of your stance on this ethical question. 2. Swenson’s poem highlights some of the beautiful difficulties of conveying a message or meaning through language. As a student of poetry, analyze how poetic devices such as metaphor and simile can both clarify and confuse a subject.

“The Woods at Night” (1962) Swenson started work on this poem on April 28, 1962, and it was originally published alone in the Nation on January 26, 1963. It appeared in her collection To Mix with Time that same year. In 1966 “The Woods at Night” was collected in Poems to Solve as one of four bird poems. Swenson’s love of birds would inspire many other birding poems throughout her career. When read aloud, “The Woods at Night” sounds like a bird’s song. It is extremely focused in that it leaves everything out of the woods except the birds. Swenson uses alliteration and rhyme patterns in

this piece to keep the poem moving along at a brisk tempo, even as most of the birds are sleeping. The reader sees the woods sharply through the nocturnal eyes of the “binocular owl” and is nearly lulled into sleepy observation by the poem’s rhymes. In the second stanza Swenson’s owl sees and lists six sleeping birds in their natural habitats, naming the “towhee under leaves,” the “titmouse deep / in a twighouse,” the “sapsucker gripped / to a knothole lip,” the “redwing in the reeds,” the “swallow in the willow,” and the “flicker in the oak.” This list concludes with a seventh bird, the one the owl “cannot see.” The distinction “poor whippoorwill” foreshadows what readers assume will be its fate. By the end of “The Woods at Night,” the reader is reminded of the owl’s predatory nature. Our suspicions are nearly confirmed when we discover that the only other bird awake in the forest is the “poor whippoorwill,” whose “stricken eye” is “flayed by the moon” as “her brindled breast / repeats, repeats, repeats, its plea / for cruelty.” As in many of Swenson’s poems, the conclusion is open-ended. We do not discover whether the whippoorwill’s taunt is answered. Although this poem stops short of directly acknowledging the violence in nature, Swenson hints at it, leaving readers with a more authentic sense of “The Woods at Night.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read Robert Frost’s “The Oven Bird” in conjunction with Swenson’s “The Woods at Night.” Both poems attempt to tell the truth about nature through the eyes of a particular bird. Consider the different perspectives that are presented in each of the poems and articulate how they affect the overall tone and message in each poem respectively. 2. Read Marianne Moore’s poem “Bird-Witted” along with “The Woods at Night.” Analyze their playful tones and consider how gender is presented in each poem.

“Blue”/“A Trellis for R.” (1967) “Blue” is one of Swenson’s famous love poems, which often employ vivid imagery from the natu-

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ral world to illuminate the eroticism of sex and love. Also called “A Trellis for R.” when it appears in a shaped format, this poem was probably written for Swenson’s life partner and lover, Rozanne Knudson, whom Swenson met at Purdue University during the 1966–67 academic year. “A Trellis for R.” was sent to publication simultaneously as a shaped poem in the Southern Review in 1969 and in Iconographs, a collection that did not appear until 1970. The fi rst line is playful, evoking the societal constructs of gender that are often associated with the colors blue and pink. Swenson acknowledges the blurring of gender roles in a lesbian relationship by calling her lover “Blue” and then immediately adding the qualification “but you are Rose too.” In its shaped form, “A Trellis for R.” is angular, with each utterance of the color “Blue” or “Rose” running directly, possibly even blurring, into the next line. As the speaker traces her lover’s face, the shape of the poem causes readers to slow down and feel the sensuality of a loving caress. When I kiss your eyes’ straight lashes down crisp go like doll’s blond straws. Glazed iris R o s e s your lids unclose to B l u e ringed targets their dark sheen spokes almost green. I sink in B l u e black R o s e heart holes until you blink (Iconographs 63).

The literary critic Sue Russell has described “A Trellis for R.” as a “lesbian ‘Song of Songs,’ with each of the lover’s features appreciated in turn as individual roses in the lattice frame of human touch.” The poem begins at the nape of her lover’s neck, moves to trace the funnel of the ear, kisses her eyes, and then her lips. Russell highlights the downward flow of the poem, which mirrors the downward-traveling caress of the lover, as “openly sexual and distinctly female” (135). Not only was “A Trellis for R.” published in the Southern Review in 1969 and in Iconographs in 1970, but it also appeared again in The Complete Love Poems of May Swenson in 2003. Swenson’s 1978 collection New and Selected Things Taking Place and the 1994 collection, Nature: Poem Old and New, reprint the unshaped poem under the title “Blue.”

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the “Song of Songs,” also known as the “Song of Solomon” and the “Canticle of Canticles,” and juxtapose the masculine imagery against the feminine imagery in Swenson’s “A Trellis for R.” 2. Compare the imagery of nature in Amy Lowell’s poem “Petals” to the imagery in Swenson’s “A Trellis for R.” How do they differ or compare?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON SWENSON AND HER WORK 1. Swenson writes about all aspects of the natural world, including science, sex, outer space, the outdoors, and even biological processes and systems. What do you think Swenson believes about our relationship with nature, and what is she trying to illuminate about human nature? 2. Swenson is a playful poet who spends a lot of time with themes revolving around gender. Keeping in mind that Swenson was raised in a conservative Mormon household and was also a lesbian, try to identify Swenson’s position on feminism and the rigidity of traditional gender roles. Do not forget to consider the way in which historical movements may have influenced her life.

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3. Finding or getting at the truth and being able to convey it through language are central themes in Swenson’s work. How does she define truth, and what reflection does that have on the poet or her readership? 4. Swenson was not a mother in the strict traditional sense, but she thought of her poems as her children. Considering her body of work and her dedication to the craft of poetry, would you say that Swenson was a good mother? And how does this new conception of motherhood inform the more traditional vocation of motherhood? WORKS CITED

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ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Bloom, Herald. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. New York: Riverhead, 1995. Doty, Mark. “Queer Sweet Thrills: Reading May Swenson.” Yale Review 88, no. 1 (2000): 86–110. Knudson, R. R., and Suzzanne Bigelow. May Swenson: A Poet’s Life in Photos. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996. “May Swenson.” Poets.org. Available online. URL: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/168. Accessed May 21, 2007. McFall, Gardner. “Introduction.” In Made with Words. By May Swenson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Ostriker, Alicia. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Russell, Sue. “A Mysterious and Lavish Power: How Things Continue to Take Place in the Work of May Swenson.” Kenyon Review 16, no. 3 (1994): 128–139. Stearman, Roberta. “The Journey Would Not Be Entirely Foolish: May Swenson’s Utah Origins.” Utah English Journal 25 (1997): 14–19. Swenson, May. “Another Animal: Poems.” In Poets of Today. Introduction by John Hall Wheelock. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954.

———. A Cage of Spines. New York: Rinehart, 1958. ———. The Complete Love Poems of May Swenson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. ———. The Complete Poems to Solve. New York: Macmillan, 1993. ———. Dear Elizabeth: Five Poems and Three Letters to Elizabeth Bishop. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000. ———. The Guess and Spell Coloring Book. Drawings by Lise Gladstone. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. ———. Half Sun, Half Sleep: New Poems. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967. ———. Iconographs Poems. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. ———. In Other Words New Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. ———. The Love Poems. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. ———. May Out West: Poems of May Swenson. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996. ———. More Poems to Solve. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971. ———. Nature: Poems Old and New. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. ———. New and Selected Things Taking Place. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. ———. Poems to Solve. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son’s, 1966. ———. “The Poet as Anti-Specialist.” Saturday Review, January 30, 1965, p. 16. ———. To Mix with Time: New and Selected Poems. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963. Zona, Kirstin Hotelling. Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and May Swenson: The Feminist Poetics of Self-Restraint. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Maure Smith

John Updike (1932–2009) Let literature concern itself, as the Gospels do, with the inner lives of hidden men. (“Updike on Updike,” New York Times, September 27, 1981)

T

he old anecdote goes like this: Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio, met a young aspiring author named William Faulkner while both were living in New Orleans. At the time, Faulkner was struggling to fi nd his voice. Anderson advised him to return to Mississippi and to write about the world that he knew: to fi nd his own little postage stamp. In this same tradition, much of John Updike’s own writing bares the transparency of his own life and experiences. Generally regarded as one of 20th-century America’s greatest men of letters, John Hoyer Updike, born in West Reading, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932, was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike. They lived with John’s maternal grandparents at 117 Philadelphia Avenue, in Shillington, a suburb of Reading. Updike attended Shillington High School, from which he graduated as senior class president and co-valedictorian in 1950. While he was in ninth grade, his family moved to the farmhouse originally owned by the Hoyers, 11 miles south of Shillington in Plowville. This move, and Updike’s subsequent boredom, are recorded in the short story “The Brown Chest” (1992). While in high school, Updike developed his interest in drawing and writing. He contributed 285 drawings, articles, and poems to the Shillington High School Chatterbox. A life in Shillington, however, was not meant to be for Updike. In Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, a

young aspiring writer named George Willard realizes that if he is to be a great writer, he must leave the small town of Winesburg. While his father earns a living in Winesburg, his mother encourages George to leave town to realize his ambition. Updike’s situation paralleled the fictional life of George Willard. In “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” Updike writes, “My avenging mission beckoned. Shillington in my mother’s vision was small town—small minds, small concerns, small hopes. We were above all that, though my father drew a living from it” (37–38). Yet he would draw upon Shillington and his memories of it numerous times in his works. Updike notes in his memoirs, Self-Consciousness (1989), that several circumstances led him to be a writer. First, writing was his mother Linda’s passion, and she strongly encouraged John to enter the profession she desired. Additionally, Updike suffered from psoriasis and stuttering. The psoriasis contributed to his writer’s discipline, and his prodigious volume of work was a response to his speech problems. These conditions caused Updike to become a prodigious reader, as well. The move to the farm in Plowville also gave John the motivation to entertain himself with books. In 1950 he entered Harvard University on a tuition scholarship and studied English. During his first year at Harvard he wrote poems and contributed drawings for the Harvard Lampoon. During his

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senior year Updike was named editor of the Harvard Lampoon. On Updike 26, he married Mary Pennington, a Radcliffe fi ne arts student. Mary’s father was a minister of the First Unitarian Church in Hyde Park, Chicago, and would be the inspiration, both personally and theologically, for several Updike characters. Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. He won a Knox Fellowship for his thesis, “Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick’s Imitations and Echoes of Horace,” which enabled him to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. While at Oxford, Updike met Katharine and E. B. White. Katharine, who was the fiction editor of the New Yorker magazine, offered him a job at the magazine. In 1955 the Updikes returned to New York and John became a “Talk of the Town” reporter. In 1957 the Updikes moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, and in 1958 Harper and Brothers published his fi rst book, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (a collection of 55 poems). His fi rst novel, The Poorhouse Fair, and fi rst collection of stories, The Same Door, were both published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1959, marking the beginning of a long publishing relationship that continues to this day. He also won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to write Rabbit, Run. His short story “A Gift from the City” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 1959. The following year, Knopf published Updike’s most famous novel, Rabbit, Run. Set in a fictionalized version of Reading, Pennsylvania, known as Brewer, Rabbit, Run is one of many stories in which Updike draws from his childhood, in setting or experience. His Olinger stories, collected in one volume in 1964, are set in a fictionalized Shillington, Pennsylvania. For many of his stories and novels the settings will ostensibly be either Reading, Pennsylvania, or greater New England. This connects him with many American writers who draw upon their sense of place as the foundation for their works. His essay “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” recollects his early years in Shillington and is set during a midlife return to his hometown, when Updike reflects upon the changes along the main street and reminiscences about its place in his fiction.

In the late 1950s, Updike began reading several theologians, including Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, whose theology would play a significant role in many of Updike’s works, beginning with the theological debate in Rabbit, Run. Barth sees God as “inconceivable,” in that humans cannot recognize God unless God reveals himself fi rst. God cannot be found “in the pantheon of human piety and religious inventive skill”: He is remote from human consciousness and can be witnessed only through his acts, most notably in the presence of Jesus Christ. Like God, “Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man.” Barth claims that man is at the boundary between heaven and Earth. Both physically and spiritually humans are bound by their own mortality, and the human landscape represents these limits. For Updike, the landscape represents the extent to which people can unify the physical with the spiritual. The horizon represents the edge of human vision, and what lies beyond the horizon is the product of the narrator’s imagination. On a textual level, Updike seeks the ability to unify the body and soul. While the theme of adultery is present in Rabbit, Run, the significance of this theme in Updike’s writing began to take shape in the mid-1960s. After a passionate love affair and the contemplation of divorce in 1962, Updike’s writing began a period of emphasis on adultery and its consequences. In 1963 he wrote the short story “Couples,” which would be developed into the 1968 novel, and was composing the fi rst drafts of Marry Me, which would be published in 1976. His stories and poems of this period brooded over the effects and consequences of adultery. Many, including the short story “Leaves,” were collected in The Music School in 1966. While adultery would be present in most of Updike’s fiction, the tone that surrounds it emerged in the 1970s as less brooding and more playful, often giving readers the false impression that Updike endorsed adultery. During the 1960s Updike’s position as a major man of letters in America was taking shape. His novel The Centaur won the National Book Award in 1963, and the following year he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, one of

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the youngest persons so honored. That same year he received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Ursinus College, the school his mother had attended. In 1966 his story “The Bulgarian Princess” won an O. Henry Prize. In 1968 his novel Couples was published and remained on the bestseller list for a year. He also appeared on the cover of Time magazine, as the subject of the cover story, “The Adulterous Society.” His story “Your Lover Just Called” was included in O. Henry Prize Stories 1968. Later that year the Updikes moved to London to avoid the Vietnam War protests. While there, Updike began researching President James Buchanan, the only president from Pennsylvania. Buchanan would become the subject of two works: the play Buchanan Dying (1974) and the novel Memories of the Ford Administration (1992). In 1970 Updike published Bech: A Book, the fi rst of three works about Updike’s fictional alter ego, Henry Bech. The three volumes (including Bech Is Back, 1982, and Bech at Bay, 1998) are short story cycles, in the same tradition as Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or James Joyce’s Dubliners. The following year, the second Rabbit novel, Rabbit Redux, was published, and Updike won the Signet Society Medal for Achievement in the Arts. In 1975 the tour-de-force novel A Month of Sundays was published. It is the fi rst of Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, in which he examines each of the three main characters in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel. Updike’s interest in Hawthorne, while evident in many of his works, presents itself overtly for the fi rst time in A Month of Sundays. James Schiff, in his discussion of Updike’s “retelling” of The Scarlet Letter (A Month of Sundays, Roger’s Version, and S.), suggests that Updike establishes a dialogue with Hawthorne through this retelling. For while Updike’s novels remain true to Hawthorne’s original myth, Updike takes Hawthorne’s novel into the late 20th century to be scrutinized under a postmodern lens. Each novel in the trilogy offers the perspective of one of the main characters (122–130). However, none of the three novels is a straight retelling of The Scarlet Letter. A Month of Sundays provides Arthur Dimmesdale’s perspective, Roger’s Version (1986) examines the myth

through the mind of Roger Chillingworth, and the epistolary S. (1988) offers Hester Prynne’s opinions on the events of The Scarlet Letter. Updike is not so much interested in the story as he is in the issues that constitute “America’s national myth.” As a fellow New Englander and product of Hawthorne’s literary legacy, Updike shares an interest in many of the issues that concerned Hawthorne. The subjects of adultery and spirituality, as well as the dichotomy between body and soul, are integral components of many of Updike’s novels. Updike was often noted for being the only practicing Christian among America’s premier contemporary writers. His Christian spirituality is evident in most of his writings, often juxtaposed with the physical subjects of adultery and sex. The dilemma of the matter/spirit dichotomy no doubt troubled Updike, who once claimed, “Matter and spirit are inevitably at war.” To understand this dilemma he turns to Hawthorne. Through a dialogue with Hawthorne, Updike attempts to reconcile matter and spirit in terms of both literary plot and literary structure. Updike and his wife, Mary, separated in 1974, and he moved into an apartment in Boston. The slow disintegration of their marriage is chronicled in the stories of Richard and Joan Maples (collected in Too Far to Go, 1979). As do the Maples, John and Mary Updike received a “no-fault” divorce in 1976. The following year he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard. Also in 1976, Marry Me: A Romance was published and Updike was elected to the 50-member American Academy of Arts and Letters. Rabbit Is Rich, the third novel about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, was published in 1981 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and the American Book Award for fiction. Updike also received the Edward MacDowell Medal for literature. The 1980s saw Updike win several awards, and he continued writing at a prodigious rate, publishing a book a year, including six novels, by the end of the decade. Later years found Updike “tidying up his desk,” so to speak. This period began with his memoirs, Self-Consciousness (1989), and much of

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his stories and fiction reflects his sense of himself as aging. Whereas the younger Updike often did not write about old age and death, the older Updike saw the proximity of death very clearly. Indeed, death is Harry Angstrom’s preoccupation in Rabbit at Rest (1990). John Updike died on January 27, 2009. At his death, he had published nearly 60 books, including novels, collections of stories, poems, criticism, children’s books, and a play. His most recent novel, Terrorist, was published in October 2006.

Rabbit, Run (1960) Rabbit, Run, fi rst published in 1960, along with its sequels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), constitute Updike’s best-known work. The novels chronicle the life of American literature’s iconic everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Rabbit, Run is Updike’s second novel and captures the transitional period between the 1950s and 1960s. The story opens with Harry walking home after a day’s work. He is 26 and sells Magi-Peel kitchen gadgets. On the way home he joins some kids in a pick-up game of basketball, a sport at which Harry excelled in high school. He fi nds renewed energy from this game, tossing out his cigarettes and heading home with a lilt in his step. His newfound affi rmation of life is quickly squashed when he arrives home to fi nd his pregnant wife, Janice, drunk and watching The Mickey Mouse Club on TV. The scene immediately depresses Harry, and when Janice asks him to pick her up some cigarettes along with their car and son, Nelson, the reality of it all is too much, and Harry runs away. He starts to drive south, but by the time he reaches West Virginia, he has forgotten his motivation for leaving and returns to Brewer. Instead of returning to the house, however, he visits his high school basketball coach, Marty Tothero, who introduces him to a prostitute named Ruth Leonard. He moves in with her, entering into an affair until his daughter, Rebecca, is born, and his family convinces him to return home. Shortly afterward he abandons Janice

again, and in her grief she accidentally drowns their newborn baby. Harry returns for the funeral only to face the accusing stares of his family. After blaming Janice for the drowning, he returns to Ruth. She informs him that she is pregnant, and Harry, once again, runs away. While Harry may seem indecisive and noncommittal, the novel reveals that he is a man of conviction who is on a spiritual quest. His values are not absent, just incongruous with the environment around him. This creates for Harry what Tony Tanner calls “a compromised environment” (Tanner 37). Rabbit, Run is a multifaceted work, and while the plot is thin, it is rich with Updike’s descriptive prose, diverse characters, and relevant themes. Many of the novel’s themes, such as religion, suburban adultery, and death, will appear in many more works to follow. The theme of entrapment is particularly prevalent here. Updike acknowledged that the subtext for the novel is The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Indeed, the “flowerpot city” of Brewer provides the setting from which Harry finds himself unable to escape. The symbols of entrapment take many forms: In the early scenes, Harry’s brown suit, a symbol of adulthood, contrasts with his ability in basketball, the sport he mastered in high school. His age has slowed him down, and the brown suit is a symbol of those advancing years. Likewise, his apartment, with the abandoned toy moldering under the steps, represents death and decay. Janice seems to be atrophying as she sits in the dim room drinking old-fashioneds and watching The Mickey Mouse Club. The juxtaposition is significant in that the more Janice clings to her childhood, the more paralyzing are the effects of adulthood. Throughout the novel she is inert: She gives birth to the baby but then drowns it when she is drunk. As a symbol of adulthood, the drinking is associated with death and decay. Certainly marriage is presented as confi ning in the novel, but only because of the complacency that it fosters. As a subject that Updike will develop throughout his career, marriage is an institution that primarily gives comfort, but at the price of complacency. One no longer needs to try in a marriage. This is seen clearly in the marriage of Lucy

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and Jack Eccles, the Episcopalian minister who befriends Harry. Repeatedly Lucy begs Jack to care more about her and their family than he does Harry. Harry and Janice’s relationship demonstrates how a marriage requires constant attention. Ironically, Lucy Eccles calls Harry and Janice’s marriage a “bad marriage,” when it is the one that will endure for 30 years, while her own marriage will not. Updike confronts the issues of religion and faith through the Reverend Jack Eccles. The young minister presents a modern, progressive faith by tending to the social problems of his parishioners. He gives Harry the soft sell and through their friendship (which Eccles enjoys as well) convinces Harry to return to Janice when the baby, Rebecca, is born. However, both his wife, Lucy, and the Angstrom’s Lutheran minister, Fritz Kruppenbach, challenge Eccles’s faith-through-ministry. Kruppenbach reprimands Eccles for becoming involved in social problems at the expense of his spiritual ministry. Kruppenbach admonishes Eccles to “make yourself an exemplar of faith” and tells him that comfort is gained from faith. He calls the busyness of meddling in lives “Devil’s work.” Lucy Eccles, who is interested in Freudian psychology, challenges Jack’s faith. In this relationship Updike shows that if one opens up religion to psychology, faith is destroyed, a topic Nathaniel Hawthorne dealt with in “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). Since Eccles is a significant presence in the novel, the casual reader might see his theology as reflecting Updike’s. However, like Rabbit, Eccles is more representative of the changing culture than the author’s persona. While Eccles is a sincere and likable character, Lucy and Kruppenbach provide rational reasons for why he is wrong. For Harry to achieve the grace he desires, he needs the “hardness of heart” exemplified by Kruppenbach. Updike studied Karl Barth, upon whom Kruppenbach is based. Barth argues that “concrete action [is] more or less hopeless in producing any absolute result.” God is “wholly other” and exists only through the desire to know him. Thus, Harry’s desire to gain grace, to fi nd “that thing that wants me to fi nd it,” connects him with God. A significant theme introduced in Rabbit, Run is that of adultery. Ruth, a part-time prostitute, is

attracted to Rabbit’s energy and optimism, which counterbalance her own cynicism. But, Harry does not merely have an affair with Ruth; he moves in with her. This seems ironic in light of his desire to break free of the confinement of his marriage. Updike challenges the philosophy of contentment that he feels plagues the middle class. The rise in affluence of the middle class in the 1950s hides a darker undercurrent: As people gained material wealth, Updike implies, they lost spiritual wealth. Harry does not reject marriage, just the empty symbol of success. Thus, he seeks fulfi llment within the context of the domestic relationship. This is seen in his sexually fulfi lling relationship with Ruth, and his desire for sex with Janice after she returns from the hospital. Throughout the Rabbit tetralogy, sex is a ritual act for Rabbit, representing his search for fulfi llment.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Discuss differences in social class between the Angstroms and Janice’s parents, the Springers. Is one family’s fortune rising while the other’s is in decline? How do their religions, symbolized by their pastors, reflect their place in the middle class? 2. Examine the scene in which Harry goes to work as a gardener for Mrs. Smith. How does this scene function in the novel? What does Smith say to Harry that contradicts what Ruth says about him? 3. At the end of the novel, Harry imagines the world as “an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook into a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.” In what ways is this image reflective of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925)?

“A&P” (1961) “A&P,” fi rst published in the New Yorker in 1961 and collected in Pigeon Feathers in 1962, is Updike’s most anthologized short story. Set in the

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mid-1950s, “A&P” tells the story of the events leading up to Sammy’s decision to quit his job as a checker at the A&P grocery store. In the story, three girls walk into the store dressed in only their bathing suits. They stroll through the store as three young men, including Sammy, stare at them. After selecting only a jar of herring snacks in cream sauce, they proceed to Sammy’s lane. While they are making their purchase, the manager, Lengle, admonishes them for their attire, ordering them to be properly dressed the next time they enter the store. In a hasty moment of futile heroism, Sammy quits his job, hoping to gain the admiration of the girls. However, when he walks out of the store, the girls are long gone, and Sammy realizes his decision to quit will have consequences. The story begins quickly: “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I didn’t see them until they’re over by the bread.” Updike dispenses with establishing the scene and protagonist and jumps right into the action. Implicit is the idea that the story and Sammy’s fateful act begin when the girls walk into the store. In this way the urgency with which the story begins parallels the urgency with which Sammy quits. This emphasizes that his decision to quit is rash and unpremeditated. It would seem that Sammy is standing up for the girls—for their freedom and their right to respect, although early in the story he objectifies them. The confusion is normal in a boy of his age: His actions are more mimicry and reaction than anything motivated by established personal values. This represents the key theme in the story: the shift of American culture and the emergence of the “generation gap.” While the values that govern Lengle, Sammy, the girls, and their parents are inherent in their culture, in practice we see youthful rebellion. The girls are rejecting their parents’ values (their mothers would not walk into the grocery store dressed only in their bathing suits), until they are challenged by Lengle, at which point they cling to the privilege of their social class by saying, “But we are decent.” Yet, the girls, dressed as they are, are behaving in a

way that is counter to their upbringing. They are dressed provocatively and are, by strolling in the grocery, selling themselves. They are fl irting with prostitution. This is not to say that they would follow through, but they are associating themselves with the working classes and rejecting their own conventional upbringing. They are rebelling against convention, which dictates a more conservative dress code in public. This rebellion is underscored by their reaction to Lengle when he strictly admonishes them about their behavior. By referring to her parents, Queenie reminds us and Lengle of her upper-middle-class upbringing, one, presumably, better than his. Yet, his admonishment reminds them that their behavior is not in accord with their class and in excess of what society will accept. The indifference of their display foretells the cultural shift that is occurring: Women are starting to assert control of their own bodies and the commodification of them is on their own terms. This feminist theme can also be seen in Sammy’s behavior. When the girls fi rst enter the store, Sammy describes them in physical terms. He studies their appearance and assesses their characters on the basis of their physical qualities: “This clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.” This simile is a faint allusion to Jake Barnes’s description of Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) as having a body “built like a racing yacht.” It is an interesting blend of feminine and mechanical beauty, consistent with his age and hormonal rush. Yet, Sammy’s simile reflects his unrefi ned upbringing. Instead of an upscale yacht, he compares her to an unrefi ned, though flashy object. While reflective of Sammy’s perspective, it is important to note that his—and the reader’s— view of the girls is affected by his own background: The shock that infuses his tone at the beginning originates in his humble circumstances. This shock changes into objectification and then pity for the girls, ultimately leading to his chivalric gesture. Another theme evident in “A&P” is the emergence of modern consumerism. The A&P sits in

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the center of town, historically a place occupied by a church. Nevertheless, the existence of the A&P in such a central place represents society’s shift from a religious culture to a consumptionoriented one. The A&P helps us satisfy our wants and needs. The herring snacks are not a staple, but a luxury, representative of the girls’ upper middle class. However, the reactions by Sammy, Stoeskie, and McMahon indicate that the girls are objects of desire, much like the herring snacks. While it is acceptable to be dressed in bathing suits at the beach, where the glare is so strong that “nobody can look at each other much anyway,” the lighting in the grocery store is designed to enhance and encourage the buying experience. By association, the girls are selling themselves—they are becoming part of the consumer culture, but as a commodity. They are objectifying themselves, for they present themselves, in a way that competes for the shopper’s attention. Because of this, they are commodities, too.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare “A&P” to James Joyce’s “Araby” in the collection Dubliners (1914). How do both protagonists suffer from the same romantic idealism? How is the epiphany Sammy experiences at the end of “A&P” similar to that experienced by the narrator of “Araby”? 2. Sammy’s comment that the woman who watches his register would have burned “over in Salem,” combined with the reference to the church across the street, connects this story to the early Puritan settlers in Massachusetts. The Puritans’ values were hard and fast. In contrast, the values implied by Sammy and the girls are in transition. Who in the story represents these Puritan values? In terms of the events in the story, does the author side with the old values or the new ones? 3. Upon reading the manuscript, Updike’s wife, Mary, remarked that “A&P” reminded her too much of J. D. SALINGER. Looking closely at the language and tone, how is Sammy similar to Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye (1951)?

“Separating” (1975) “Separating” originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1975. It was later collected in Problems and Other Stories (1979) and Too Far to Go (1979), a collection of Maple stories. “Separating” tells the story of the parents Richard and Joan Maple’s announcement to their children that they will be separating. While Richard and Joan had carefully planned the event, as so often happens, events do not go exactly as planned, and Richard is forced to confront the issue personally with each child, ultimately realizing the depravity of his decision. The characters in “Separating” are Richard and Joan Maple, and their four children: Judith, 19; Richard, Jr., also referred to as “Dickie,” 17; John, 14; and Margaret, 13, who is also called “Bean.” The children’s reactions to the parents’ news are more reflective of gender than age, and Judith and Margaret react more passively than the two boys do. This distinction reveals one of the themes in the story: the role of the father. Like many of Updike’s male protagonists, Richard Maple is at once selfconscious and self-absorbed. At two points in the story, Joan’s comments hint at Richard’s preference for work over family. When Joan states that telling the kids is “not just some corporate obstacle to your freedom,” and Richard says to John, “You were the only one who ever tried to help me with all the goddam [sic] jobs around this place,” it is suggested that Richard values the tangible, solvable problems of the business world over the intangible, amorphous emotions of his family. The second passage implies that because John helped, he loved his father more than the others did. Indeed, John’s comment “What do you care about us? We’re just little things you had” recognizes Richard’s emotional distance from his family. The subsequent conversation with John, about his miserable school year, reflects Richard’s lack of awareness of his family. Later, when he is driving Dickie home, we learn that he has a lover, whom he plans to marry. His attention is focused outside his home and family. While John and Dickie seem troubled, the two daughters, Judith and Margaret, appear more stoically resolved. Margaret reacts with relief, and

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Judith responds pragmatically, saying, “I think it’s silly. You should either live together or get divorced.” The girls’ reactions seemingly echo Joan’s stoic resolve, and they innately align themselves with her. Traditionally, the mother is the bedrock of the family, and the kids know that Joan would never leave them. Consequently, they realize that it is Richard who is leaving. John’s reaction is disappointment that his father, a role model, is failing to reinforce values and family. Likewise, the “gutted fort” of the church is another irony in the story. The values promoted by Christianity are supposed to strengthen marriage and family. But, while Richard may attend church regularly, his actions across the green undermine what the church represents. Ultimately, the church is ineffectual at keeping their marriage intact. Symbols like the church, the tennis court, and the house suggest that no matter what people build to structure their lives, they cannot ward off the disorder that plagues human relationships. John’s initial reaction at the table, “Why didn’t you tell us? You should have told us you weren’t getting along” reflects a common reaction of children, who feel somehow responsible for the dissolution of their parents’ marriage and thus can change the outcome. Up until this point in the story, Richard’s emotions are brewing, yet the children seem oblivious to them. His repairing of the lock appears to be a normal event, yet his reasons for doing so reveal the complex emotions of the adult world. Despite Richard’s apparent lack of awareness of his family, he perceives the symbolic value of the world around him: He sees the need to repair the locks and windows as a need to protect his family from the truth of his own irresponsible actions. The image of Richard repairing the house is the controlling image in the story. He is repairing the physical house, while the emotional home is left in a state of disrepair. As one of the Maple stories, “Separating” is also contained in the collection Too Far to Go. While the story offers much to be considered on its own merits, students might also want to consider the story in the context of the other Maples stories. In this context, “Separating” details the climax of

their relationship. Chronologically, it is preceded by “Nakedness” and followed by the clever “Here Come the Maples,” the story of their no-fault divorce trial. Reading the stories in the collection, one gets a clearer understanding of the characters and the reasons for their split.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The story begins, “The day was fair. Brilliant.” This sets the tone for the story because it shows the confl ict of the Maples’ internal misery and the indifferent world around them. This theme is closely tied to naturalism, which emphasizes nature’s indifference to human suffering. Discuss some other examples in the story that reflect nature’s indifference to human trials and suffering. 2. Discuss the ways in which the tennis court is a metaphor for the Maples’ marriage. 3. The children react to their father’s news in various ways. Discuss how the varied reactions reflect his failure as a father and their frustration about this failure.

The Witches of Eastwick (1984) Published in 1984, The Witches of Eastwick is a novel about three witches, Sukie Rougemont, Jane Smart, and Alexandra “Lexa” Spofford, who have divorced their husbands, pursue their careers, and form a relationship with a mysterious “scientist” from New York, Darryl Van Horne. Van Horne seduces the witches by encouraging them to develop their talents. He uses them to get to Jenny Gabriel, the daughter of Sukie’s lover. Darryl marries Jenny, and she becomes pregnant. But, the spurned witches cast a spell on Jenny, giving her cancer. After she dies, Van Horne gives a parodic sermon at the Unitarian church, then leaves town with Jenny’s brother, Christopher, his new lover. The novel ends with the witches using spells to conjure new husbands and leaving Eastwick. The two main themes in the novel are the emergence of evil in middle-class society and the relation of evil to feminism. The novel takes place in

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the 1960s during the Vietnam War. Eastwick is presented as a small middle-class Rhode Island town, distinguished by its provincialism. Yet this small town also seems to be a vortex of supernatural power, for not only does it attract the satanic Van Horne from New York, but the three witches claim that their powers increased when they arrived in Eastwick. As a “scientist,” Van Horne is attempting to fi nd a way to circumvent the second law of thermodynamics: entropy. By this he is attempting to consolidate and preserve power. This functions metaphorically, because, under his tutelage, the three witches’ powers increase. Van Horne seduces the women by pandering to their desire for power. However, by depending on Van Horne to feed their desires for power, they weaken their independence. Thus, ultimately Van Horne’s power increases. Power is the central metaphor, especially as it applies to feminism. While The Witches of Eastwick presents some of Updike’s strongest female characters, his caveat is what happens when feminism is unchecked. The hedonism of the townsfolk reflects the shifting morals in the feminist age. As wives and mothers, the witches had existed in an entropic universe, not unlike Harry Angstrom’s world in the Rabbit tetralogy. The witches represent Harry’s worst fear: In their desire for power, women abandon their role as wife and mother. Ironically, their emotional attachment to a man (Van Horne) ultimately becomes their undoing. Moreover, Updike offers a double blow when it is revealed that while Van Horne used the witches to get to Jenny, he used Jenny to get to her brother, Chris. When he fi nally leaves town with Chris as his new lover, he deflates the witches’ power. Ultimately, The Witches of Eastwick is an antifeminist argument. First Van Horne rejects the witches in favor of the more demure Jenny. This makes him the model husband, a role the witches mocked at the beginning of the novel. The fi nal twist—that Van Horne was really in love with Chris—indicates that he would prefer another man as a lover to a liberated woman. The resolution of Van Horne’s fi nding happiness with Chris and each of the women’s casting spells to create her ideal

husband implies that the search for personal happiness triumphs over social ideology.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In his sketch “Sights from a Steeple,” Nathaniel Hawthorne claims that the ideal narrator should be omniscient. However, the narrator’s desire for omniscience is presented as a threat to God, who alone is omniscient. Updike employs the third-person omniscient point of view in the novel. Discuss Updike’s use of a godlike persona to tell the story of the devil and three witches. 2. Why does Darryl Van Horne reference the dictionary and not the Bible when he delivers his sermon? How is the development of the dictionary similar to Adam’s job of naming the animals? What does it say about the foundation of religion? 3. Near the end of the novel, Jane says to Alexandra, “Lexa, don’t you understand? There was never anything there. We imagined him” (298). Explain the possibility that the existence of Darryl Van Horne was a figment of their collective imagination. Considering that their witchcraft was fantastic, is it possible that the whole story is, too?

“Brother Grasshopper” (1987) “Brother Grasshopper” is a contemporary variation on Aesop’s “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” In the fable, a grasshopper, enjoying the summer, sees an ant busily storing food for the winter. The grasshopper mockingly asks the ant to join him at play. But, the ant insists that he must store up food for the winter and suggests that the grasshopper do the same. The grasshopper, content in the moment, replies, “Why bother about winter?” When winter begins, the ants have plenty of food, while the grasshopper dies of hunger. The moral of the story: It is best to prepare for the days of necessity. “Brother Grasshopper,” fi rst printed in the New Yorker (December 14, 1987) and then collected in The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), tells the story of Fred Emmet’s relationship with

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his brother-in-law, Carlyle Saughterfield, over the course of about 25 years. As the ant, Fred is thrifty and hardworking, characteristics emphasized by his contrast with Carlyle, who, in Fred’s eyes, is eccentric and conspicuously wasteful. Told in the third person, the story covers a broad span of time yet focuses on one aspect of Fred’s life: his relationship with Carlyle. A major theme in the story is perspective. The story begins with Fred Emmet’s reflection on his father’s relationship with his brother. Fred, who is an only child, has only one view of life. His father’s brother gave his father an additional perspective—a second way of looking at the world. To Fred, Carlyle, who is fi rst his “brother in courtship” and later his brother-in-law, becomes that second perspective. The story chronicles the events leading to Fred’s epiphany at the end. The lesson ultimately learned fi lls the lack that is implied at the beginning. As an only child, Fred lacked completeness. He lacked the fulfi llment of a sibling. When he marries, it is to supply “himself with another roommate.” A spouse should “augment” one’s existence and give it an additional dimension available to him all his life. Central to this theme of perspective is the camera. Carlyle “had become a fervent photographer, fi rst with Nikons and then with Leicas, until he discovered that an even more expensive camera could be bought—a Hasselblad” (35). Fred sees the cameras in terms of cost, but they are different types of cameras—a single-lens reflex (SLR), a rangefi nder, and a square format camera—and thus capture the images differently. Carlyle uses a variety of cameras to see the world diversely and to capture memories in different ways. In contrast, Fred sees the world in only one way. It is not until the end of the story—presented as a photographic moment—that Fred realizes that Carlyle has been desperately trying to forge and capture memories for his family. The appearance of the sun as an “instant of illumination” functions as a camera flash and represents the moment of Fred’s epiphany. In Aesop’s fable the ant stores seeds for the winter, while the grasshopper plays. In Updike’s story Fred, as the ant, is the embodiment of America’s

Protestant work ethic. Yet, Fred seems to be at once critical and admiring of the indolent Carlyle. There is something celebratory in Carlyle’s love of life and eternal optimism. Whereas Fred works hard and slowly accumulates wealth, Carlyle, born wealthy, is careless with his money, but nonetheless creative. In addition to his interest in photography, cooking, and movies, he has six children (overindulgence in Fred’s eyes). Fred realizes in the end that Carlyle’s creative impulse offsets his fragile health. In the end Carlyle is referred to as “the dead man,” a nameless corpse, emphasizing how we will all end. How we live our lives will not change our fate but will affect other people’s lives. Updike draws from the Disney version of the fable, which casts the grasshopper as a musician—an artist—who has at least some value. In the end of this version the grasshopper earns his keep by entertaining the ants. Produced during the heart of the depression, the Disney version effectively argues for the value of entertainment in a time when movies were perceived as an indulgence but also a way to escape. While the movie industry was a viable business in the 1960s, Carlyle’s investment in “blue movies” undercuts his legitimacy. This is the facet of Hollywood still considered indulgent and countercultural in America. In many ways the characters in “Brother Grasshopper” are evocative of the characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Early in the story Fred’s view of Carlyle is reminiscent of Nick’s view of Tom Buchanan. Both are strong and athletically intimidating and have “confident access to the skills and equipment of expensive sports” (30). Both are conspicuous in their spending. As the story develops, Carlyle’s love of life and eternal optimism suggest the romanticism of Jay Gatsby. Just as Nick is subsumed by Gatsby, Carlyle’s personality overshadows Fred’s. Yet, it is Gatsby’s fatal fl aw, his inability to deviate from his goal and his blind adherence to his code, that links him to Fred. Like Gatsby, who follows a strict daily schedule, as prescribed by Benjamin Franklin, and religiously adheres to achieving his goal, Fred is fundamentally shaped by his Protestant work ethic. Throughout the story, his view

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of Carlyle is tainted by this ethic. When he turns down Carlyle’s invitation to invest in his fi lm project, his rejection becomes a rhetorical death sentence for Carlyle. The significance of this similarity to Gatsby indicates Updike’s message that, while Aesop provides good advice for conducting our lives, life in contemporary America is more complex. Moreover, while Fred gives Carlyle the “brotherly lesson in limits” that kills him, Carlyle gives Fred the fi nal lesson. Although we all return to the earth (ashes to ashes, dust to dust), we leave behind a legacy of human relationships forged over time. In the end Fred has a much larger family than he began with.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The story is based on the fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” In the fable the ant is industrious and the grasshopper is lazy. How does Updike develop the ant and grasshopper into characters who have both positive and negative traits? 2. Several times in the story Fred sees a “watery warm-eyed look” in Carlyle. What does this look represent? Does it reveal Carlyle’s helplessness or his introspection? 3. At the end of the fi lm The Maltese Falcon (1930), Sam Spade describes the falcon statue as “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Carlyle’s foray into the movie business represents a uniquely American passion that leads to “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Carlyle is seduced by the Southern California lifestyle, and this seduction leads to his death. How do Carlyle’s forays into business and artistic ventures and fi nally fi lm ventures reflect his lack of dreams?

“The Brown Chest” (1992) Originally published in the Atlantic (May 1992) and then collected in The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), “The Brown Chest” is one of Updike’s mature stories, reflecting his own aging and the loss of his own mother. Short on plot, the story is symbolically rich with multiple layers of meaning. The story relates the narrator’s relationship to a

brown chest his mother kept in the attic during his childhood. The chest contained mementos of her life and those of her family. The chest was a source of anxiety for the narrator, and its presence and recurrence in the narrator’s life have a distinctly haunting quality. Eventually, when the narrator’s mother dies, the narrator is forced to take possession of the trunk and its contents. While the contents of the chest are not a secret per se, the opening of the chest by his future daughter-in-law results in a Pandora-like outpouring of the memories tied to it. The story is told from the third-person limited omniscient point of view. This perspective focuses exclusively on the consciousness of the main character and his relationship with the chest and his environment. In this story Updike draws from John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), employs gothic elements, and alludes to the Pandora myth to emphasize the narrator’s fear of the past. Unlike Keats’s urn, which is decorated with images of humans in action, Updike’s chest is devoid of the presence of society or civilization. This absence contributes to the speaker’s fear of worlds without people—he existed in unpopulated space. This relationship to his space lends the story its gothic elements. The opening paragraph introduces the gothic component of the story. The chest and the boy exist within the house he lives in with his parents and maternal grandparents, and the boy has divided the house into sections containing “popular cheerful places,” “haunted places,” and places that existed not physically, but psychologically, “in between” (225). One such “in between” space is the guest bedroom. This room is where his relationship with his mother is formed, and it is a space for spiritual growth. The mother prevents the room from becoming haunted. She also keeps the chest. As the keeper of the chest and the recorder of memories, she is the narrator’s link to the past. However, he sees her mostly as a means of protecting him from the past. Only when she dies is he forced to take ownership of the chest. In fact, his fear of the chest is linked to a fear of the attic. The narrator explains that he has defi ned these spaces and that the chest

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exists in the haunted space. He fears it by association. Therefore, everything associated with the chest causes anxiety. As Keats’s urn does, the brown chest represents the past. As the urn inspired Keats, the chest haunts the speaker with its message. However, unlike the urn, whose exterior is decorated with images of civilization, the chest, clad only in brown “paint” (later acknowledged as stain), is devoid of images. As stated, this absence reflects the speaker’s fear of worlds without people. The narrator ascribes meaning to its surface. Indeed, the “blank” side represents the portion of history waiting to be written. The paint itself represents the memories that are attached to it and how we attach memories to objects. The memories (mementos) collected in the chest belong to the narrator’s mother. They represent many people and many generations and form a catalog of her memories. We cling to such memories; they represent and inform our lives. The chest and its memories become the narrator’s when his mother dies, although they mean something different to him than they did to her (for one, to him the chest is an object of fear). Updike draws from two sources for the end of the story. As a symbol of the narrator’s fears and anxiety, the chest is a Pandora’s box. Edith Hamilton describes the myth of Pandora: “For Pandora, like all women, was possessed of a lively curiosity. She had to know what was in the box. One day she lifted the lid—and out flew plagues innumerable, sorrow and mischief for mankind” (Hamilton 71–72). Morna, his future daughter-in-law, opens the chest, “and out swooped, with the same vividness that had astonished and alarmed his nostrils as a child, the sweetish deep cedary smell, undiminished, cedar and camphor and paper and cloth, the smell of family, family without end” (233). Rather than plagues innumerable, out fly smells representing the past. Then, as in Marcel Proust’s multivolume novel Remembrance of Things Past, smells trigger memories in the speaker’s mind, which connect with the same smell of “camphor and cedar” that the speaker remembers

from 40 years ago. Thus, in a moment when the text calls attention to itself, its opening triggers memories, which the narrator draws upon to narrate this story.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How does the point of view shift in the story? Though it is always a third person, limited omniscient point of view, the reader is limited to what the young boy understands. How does this technique echo that used by James Joyce in his short story “Araby” (1914)? 2. In what way is Morna essential to opening the chest? By opening the chest will she bridge the gap between the narrator’s mother’s memories and his grandchildren? 3. The narrator seeks to balance his getting lost with his son’s careless handling of the chest, which results in its splitting. How does the narrator imply personification of the chest? What, then, does the chest represent?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON UPDIKE AND HIS WORK 1. Many of Updike’s works deal with confl icts of faith. In A Month of Sundays, for example, the Reverend Tom Marshfield is sent to a resort in Arizona to reform himself after being caught in an adulterous relationship with his organist. In many works, actions and faith seem to be at odds. Select a single work and analyze how Updike resolves the confl ict between faith and action. Specifically, how does the protagonist reconcile his faith with his errant ways? 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne mastered the literary form known as the romance. Several of Updike’s works are modeled on this literary form as well (Marry Me, A Month of Sundays, The Witches of Eastwick). Read one or more of these romances by Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), or The Marble Faun (1860). Identify what characteristics make his brand of

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romance unique. How do Updike’s novels fit Hawthorne’s form? 3. In his essay collection “Nature” (1836), Ralph Waldo Emerson states that “a work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature.” Most of Updike’s novels and stories are set in rural or suburban settings, and often within these larger contexts, the drama is confi ned to a small area. In what ways do the stories and themes in Updike’s works represent “the world in miniature”? WORKS CITED

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A DDITIONAL R ESOURCES

Bailey, Peter J. Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006. Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony in Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Greiner, Donald J. Adultery in the American Novel: Updike, James, and Hawthorne. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: New American Library, 1940. Hunt, George. John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things: Sex, Religion and Art. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980. “Life and Times: John Updike.” New York Times Online. Available online. URL: http://www.

nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/lifetimes/ updike.html. Accessed March 25, 2009. Markel, Joyce B. Fighters and Lovers: Theme in the Novels of John Updike. New York: New York University Press, 1973. Olster, Stacey, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Plath, James, ed. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Pritchard, William H. Updike: America’s Man of Letters. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth, 2000. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: John Updike.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/ chap10/updike.html. Accessed March 11, 2007. Schiff, James A. Updike’s Version: Rewriting The Scarlet Letter. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Tanner, Tony. “A Compromised Environment.” In John Updike, edited by Harold Bloom: New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Updike, John. “Audio John Updike Interview with Don Swain.” Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/johnupdike/. Accessed March 11, 2007. Yerkes, James, ed. John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999.

Dean R. Cooledge

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922–2007) We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. (Kilgore Trout’s epitaph, Breakfast of Champions)

K

nown for his wit, comically absurd works, and humanitarian vision, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.— perhaps the greatest American satirist since Mark Twain—became an icon for the “baby-boomer” generation, those born during post–World War II years. Idolized by the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, Vonnegut spoke to a generation disillusioned by ineffective institutions, the nuclear arms race, and the Vietnam War. Significantly, although some consider him to be a period writer, Vonnegut’s works continue to be read and taught, especially his powerful testimony to the bombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five. Although often labeled a science fiction writer, a designation that Vonnegut abhorred, he created experimental, fantastic worlds populated with grotesque characters to address contemporary sociopolitical concerns. As Vonnegut said, “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a fi le drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ . . . and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal” (Wampeters 1). Questioning who we are, why we are here, and what it is that we as social beings should be doing, Vonnegut’s oftenscathing, bitterly satirical works depict a world in which God is strangely absent, a place where stock characters and fantastical creations negotiate a world of chance. There, amid alien creatures and with the aid of time-traveling machines and horrific forms of technology, Vonnegut’s creations

bear witness to the various shortcomings that make us fallible, comic creatures. They often touch upon the limits of reason, the illusion of progress, the horrors of war, the absurdity of nuclear proliferation, the reality of class differences, the construct of race, and the need for human beings to erect meaning-making systems, such as the facetious religion of Bokonon in his 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. Combining high hilarity with what some consider pessimistic depictions of humanity’s frailty and self-centered tendencies, Vonnegut commented upon the delusions that round our lives and often distract us from real, pressing social concerns. By showing us who we are through a distorted, funhouse mirror, by lauding the power of fiction to reenvision our place in the world, and by challenging us to create a better, more humane society, Vonnegut earned himself a secure place in the canon of postmodern American fiction. Born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Edith and Kurt Vonnegut, German Americans who already had two children, Vonnegut grew up in an upper-class home. His father was an architect; his mother was the daughter of a wealthy brewer, Peter Lieber. Vonnegut’s older brother and sister had many advantages, including a live-in governess and private schooling. Yet, with the advent of Prohibition, which banned alcohol consumption, and the beginning of the Great Depression, the Vonnegut family could not afford these same luxuries

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for Kurt, Jr. During this time Vonnegut’s father, the first to be licensed as an architect in Indiana, had no work for 10 years, although the family, as a result of the Lieber fortune, never went without. Nevertheless, Vonnegut was aware of the many hopes and dreams that were dashed during that period, a theme he would return to time and time again in books that often show the futility of the American dream, whose myth of self-ascendancy, as witnessed in both the Lieber and Vonnegut families, rarely held true for other Americans. Vonnegut’s grandfathers both immigrated to America in 1848, German immigrants during a wave of immigration that marked mid-19th-century America. While both men became prosperous, they and their families knew the sort of discrimination often experienced by émigrés and sought refuge in the tight-knit German community of Indianapolis. Thus, even at an early age, Vonnegut developed both a sensitivity to social conditions and an awareness for others’ needs despite his own family’s relative well-being. At an early age Vonnegut established himself as a man of letters, writing for the first daily high school paper in the United States, serving as both a correspondent and editor. From 1940 to 1942 Vonnegut attended Cornell University, where he majored in biochemistry and wrote for the school’s newspaper, the Sun, where he often opposed U.S. intervention in World War II. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, however, Vonnegut enlisted in the army. He was educated as an engineer by the army and then sent to serve as an infantry scout with the 106th Infantry Division in Europe. There, Vonnegut took part in the Battle of the Bulge, where he was captured by the Germans, taken to a prison camp, and later forced to labor in Dresden, a German city laid to waste during the devastating firebombing by Allied forces on the evening of February 13, 1945. With his fellow prisoners Vonnegut helped pull bodies from the debris and took them to be cremated. This event became a foundational experience to which Vonnegut would return time and time again, most notably in his masterwork, Slaughterhouse-Five. Yet, before Dresden’s bombing Vonnegut experienced another devastating loss when his mother, Edith, a longtime depres-

sion sufferer, committed suicide during a specially arranged Mother’s Day visit home. After the war Vonnegut returned to Indianapolis; married his high school sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox; and then moved to Chicago, where he pursued a graduate degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked as a police reporter. When the university rejected his thesis, which he later described as “my prettiest contribution to my culture” (Palm Sunday 312), Vonnegut took a job with General Electric in Schenectady, New York, where he worked as a public relations copywriter. These years led Vonnegut to disdain corporate institutions, which he viewed as inhumane, and taught him about the destructive potential of science, two obsessions he explored in numerous works, including his first published story, “The Barnhouse Effect” (1950), and his first novel, Player Piano (1952). Strongly autobiographical, Player Piano transpires in a dystopian future where the protagonist rebels against the Illium works, a thinly guised depiction of General Electric and corporate America. Here, and throughout his corpus, Vonnegut often intervenes in the text, interjecting commentary through the creation of a writer-character—in this case, Ed, and in later works often Kilgore Trout, a hack science fiction writer whose works appear in pornographic magazines—who reflects upon the action at hand and its significance while parodying the role of the author in creating the text. Vonnegut’s disillusionment with his General Electric job led him in 1951 to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where he devoted his life to writing, sustaining himself with short stories he submitted to numerous popular magazines, including Collier’s, which published his first story. In Cape Cod, Vonnegut and Jane had three children, whom the author raised with the income he garnered as a writer. When the market demand for short stories waned in the late 1950s, Vonnegut turned to novel writing, publishing The Sirens of Titan (1959)—the story of Malachi Constant, a wealthy playboy who eventually travels to space, gets lost on Mercury, returns to Earth, and ultimately is banished to Titan. Such absurd works dealing with science in a nonrealistic manner caused

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many critics to identify Vonnegut as a science fiction writer, an ironic characterization because the novel can also be read as a parody of the genre. Vonnegut defied this mischaracterization with his next novel, Mother Night (1962), whose name Vonnegut lifted from a speech Mephistopheles gives in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808). Written in the form of a memoir by Howard W. Campbell, Jr., who is an Allied spy during World War II posing as a Nazi propagandist, Mother Night provides a more realistic plot and setting, thus departing from the more fantastical worlds of his first two works. With Cat’s Cradle (1963) Vonnegut first received a wide readership. An apocalyptic novel about an island society with a comic figure, Bokonon, who creates a religion the islanders know is all “lies” (foma) and writes the “The Books of Bokonon,” Cat’s Cradle includes a comic retelling of the Genesis creation story, descriptions of sacred foot rituals, and many fictive terms such as wampeter, duprass, and karass that appear throughout the novel. As his cult following grew, Cat’s Cradle propelled Vonnegut into the mainstream, eventually becoming required reading in many high schools and colleges. While Cat’s Cradle is certainly more than a period piece, the novel spoke to a generation disillusioned with war, institutions, and religious dogma. In this way the novel fostered the counterculture of the 1960s. At stake in the novel are the increasing paranoia over the cold war and the very real threat of nuclear annihilation. Thus, the substance that ends the world, Ice-Nine, can be understood as an example of the sort of technology that, in attempting to better the world, actually has the power to end all life on the planet. Again, Vonnegut draws on his own life in Schenectady, mirroring the science-obsessed researchers he encountered at General Electric with Dr. Felix Hoenikker and Vonnegut’s own family with the three Hoenikker children. As with other works Vonnegut embeds a writer in the text, in this case, the narrator, Jonah/ John, who is writing a book that mirrors both Cat’s Cradle and the Books of Bokonon, called The Day the World Ended. Vonnegut’s next work, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), is a story devoid of science fiction elements yet fi lled with Vonnegut grotesquerie in

which a sexual eunuch, Eliot Rosewater, describing himself as “a drunkard, a Utopian dreamer, a tinhorn saint, an aimless fool,” gives out money by the droves from the millions of dollars he has inherited. Rosewater is a comical figure, a satirical image of the “bleeding-heart” liberal turned philanthropist. Described through a series of vignettes that chronicle Eliot’s life among the citizens of Rosewater County, Indiana, Rosewater is a tool for Vonnegut to lampoon social injustice, especially economic inequality and the illusion of welfare that self-promoting philanthropists often create. Significantly, this novel is the fi rst of Vonnegut’s works to include the science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, whom Eliot greatly admires; the narrative makes Trout into a messianic figure. As it describes social inequity, the absurdity of the legal system, and the consequences of selfinterest, Rosewater challenges us to look beyond the hypocrisy found in modern society and to see the need for compassion in a world bent on economic gain. While Vonnegut earned his living from novels, he continued to write short stories and collected previously written, intertwined stories in Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), which contains stories ranging from the well-known “Harrison Bergeron” to “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” and “EPICAC.” In Slaughterhouse-Five: or, The Children’s Crusade (1969), Vonnegut recalls the foundational absurd experience that formed his vision of the world: the bombing of Dresden. Through Billy Pilgrim, the novel’s protagonist, who becomes “unstuck” in time, traveling to the future and being abducted by aliens who place him in a zoo cage with a porn star, Montana Wildhack, for their own entertainment, Vonnegut creates a world equally absurd. Additionally, Vonnegut ends the novel by referencing key current events that take place at the time he was writing the novel, including the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and MARTIN LUTHER K ING, JR., and the Vietnam War. In this way Vonnegut points out the cyclical nature of violence, the way history is repeating itself. Like Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five is an antinovel, one that challenges linear conceptions of time and the conventions of narrative fiction we normally associate with verisimilitude, the appearance of reality. Yet, although Pilgrim is not real, the view he

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affords of human history and the destructive potential of humanity underscores many of the themes he explored in previous works and will elaborate upon for the remainder of his career: the need for fiction to engage moral issues, to represent suffering, and to serve as a foil for the confusing state of modernity, which often seems to be a lost cause. A novel about the inhumanity of war, about fiction, and about Vonnegut’s own life experiences, it remains the exemplar against which all of his other works have been judged. After the publication of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, the two most widely taught of Vonnegut’s works, the author continued to be prolific, writing over a dozen novels, collections of essays, two plays, and short stories and working as an artist. While Vonnegut’s works have often received mixed critical reviews, the novels have sold well and remain in print. Notably, Breakfast of Champions (1973) showcases Vonnegut the visual artist, who provides hand-drawn artwork in a narrative that connects the lives of two comic characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer, and Kilgore Trout, the recurring Vonnegut alter ago found in so many of his books. Vonnegut married his second wife, Jill Krementz, a photographer, in 1979; with her he had a daughter. His last work, published in 2005, was a best-selling, politically charged collection of autobiographical essays that show Vonnegut at his satirical best, offering wry observations about everyday life; making bold, often controversial claims about politics; lambasting President George W. Bush; and employing the dark humor seen by some as pessimism for which he is known. When the collection sold well, Vonnegut referred to it as “a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.” Vonnegut wrestled with demons throughout this life, born both of his emotional disposition and of cataclysmic events: the bombing of Dresden, the suicide of his mother, the tragic death of his sister and her husband in a 48-hour period, and his own attempted suicide in 1984. Nevertheless, he managed to generate meaning from his own personal struggles. His language was humorous, imaginative, and whimsical, and yet the hallmark of his postmodern style was simplicity rather than complex-

ity. Thus, we can read Vonnegut quickly and easily, often consuming entire works in one sitting. In this way Vonnegut is a model contemporary stylist who shapes language so that it can be read with alacrity in a world where the speed of communication demands writing that can be processed with ease. Here it is worth quoting Vonnegut’s advice on “How to Write with Style” from a 1981 issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications, which can be found on the Internet: Find a subject you care about. Do not ramble, though. Keep it simple. Sound like yourself. Say what you mean to say. Pity the readers. For really detailed advice . . . I commend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White. (Macmillan, 1979) In pairing down word choices, in writing concisely, in directly engaging the reader, Vonnegut targeted a wide audience. His work continues to attract readers all over the world. His major themes are the mechanized world and the way it determines our lives, the way the desire for material goods controls us, the failures of religion and science to improve our lot, the nature of art as artifice rather than truth, and the way events occur randomly in a world where we desperately grasp for order and meaning.

“Report on the Barnhouse Effect” (1950) Vonnegut’s first short story, “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” was published in Collier’s magazine on February 11, 1950, and later collected in Welcome to the Monkeyhouse (1968), around the time when Vonnegut resigned his position at General Electric to move to Cape Cod in order to write full time. “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” describes the pressures applied to a scientist who courageously chooses to face real problems rather than to accept the comforting illusions that military men offer him. He dares to question the morality of using

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a humanitarian invention as a destructive military weapon. When Professor Barnhouse fi rst discovers the power of dynamopsychism, he looks upon it as only a toy, as a way to amuse himself by causing dice to produce the combinations he requests. Gradually the absent-minded psychology professor practices and perfects this power to the point where he can destroy individuals, houses, even mountains. While he would have preferred to use this power to run generators “where there isn’t any coal or waterpower” and to irrigate deserts, the U.S. Army feels that this priceless gift should be used as a weapon since “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom” (165). Because this time-worn cliché is so much patriotic bilge as far as Vonnegut is concerned, it becomes clear that Barnhouse eventually must oppose the military establishment. When Barnhouse turns to his graduate research assistant for advice, he repeatedly asks him such questions as “Think we should have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?” and “Think every new piece of scientific information is a good thing for humanity?” (161). This line of questioning echoes an episode in Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, when Paul Proteus is asked to tell a lie during his trial so that his lie detector can be calibrated, replying “every new piece of scientific knowledge is a good thing for humanity” (297). The turning point for Barnhouse occurs when military officials request that he prove how powerful his gift is by destroying a number of missiles and ships during “Operation Barnhouse.” He reacts by declaring that he fi nds the idea “childish and insanely expensive” (164). While the military officials are exulting over Barnhouse’s successful destruction of the weapons, he quietly makes his escape. The scientist, from his secluded sanctuary, spends the next few years destroying all military stockpiles despite the outraged cries of “stouthearted patriots” (168). Vonnegut concludes his story by revealing that the narrator, Barnhouse’s former research assistant, is planning to flee and assume his former mentor’s antiwar activities so that the elderly scientist’s death will not result in the resumption of hostilities. “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” provides a rather unsatisfactory answer to the question of how

humans are to control scientific and technological advances. Barnhouse is a godlike figure who, when asked by the military establishment to do what he feels is morally wrong, personally guarantees the safety of the world by destroying all weapons; such a scientist who values human life over research in pure science, does not appear either in Cat’s Cradle or in Player Piano to help Paul Proteus or John. If Vonnegut means to imply that the world is in such dire straits that no mere mortal, but only a man with superhuman power like Barnhouse, can solve its problems, then his cosmic view is a pessimistic one indeed. He seems to modify this view, however, in his short story “EPICAC” (1950).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Professor Barnhouse and his assistant are scientists aware of the unintended destructive harm technological innovation can cause and take active measures to prevent the progress they have made from being inappropriately used. Compare Vonnegut’s portrayal of scientists in “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” with Dr. Felix Hoenikker in his novel Cat’s Cradle. Why does Vonnegut continue to use flat character types when he creates scientists? What significance do these flat scientist characters have in understanding Vonnegut’s worldview? 2. As “Report on the Barnhouse Effect” does, “EPICAC,” “Thanasphere,” and “The Euphio Question” form commentaries on science and technology. Here and throughout his works Vonnegut seems skeptical about technological progress. With these four stories in mind, write a well-developed essay on Vonnegut’s understanding of technology and the dangers Vonnegut sees in developing these tools of “progress.”

“Harrison Bergeron” (1961) “Harrison Bergeron” was first published in the October 1961 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Vonnegut’s third publication in a science fiction magazine, the story is set in a future dystopian society where the government imposes restraints to

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equalize all members of the society. Those who are not equal—those who are not “normal,” which for the story means “perfectly average”—receive grotesque handicaps: hideous masks, clown noses, thick glasses, headsets that disrupt thinking with jarring sounds, and “sashweights and bags of birdshot” to impair movement. Instituted by constitutional amendments, egalitarian laws are enforced by “the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General,” or (Diana Moon Glampers), who strangely resembles Harrison’s “perfectly average” mother, and the “H-G men” (an obvious play on G-men, the 1940s and 1950s slang term for Federal Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service agents, also known as “government men”), who lead the “abnormal” 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron away in the clammy month of April. Unlike Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which April’s showers bring new life and the hope for renewal, everything in Harrison’s world, including the heralding of spring, is portrayed as a grotesque nightmare. As the story opens, Harrison Bergeron, the genius, an athletic, good-looking boy of 14, has been taken away by the H-G men because he poses a threat to society. He is exceptional in every single way, the vision of excellence and perfection that the society has labored to control. As in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktock Man” (1965), Vonnegut’s police state squelches all forms of civil disobedience; all three stories form a commentary on the nature of power, corruption, and blindness that often ensues when the desire to build the perfect society is unchecked. In Vonnegut’s work the Handicapper General eradicates difference, denies individual rights, and sees freewill as antithetical to the common good: Society members are cogs in a wheel, all subjugating themselves to the needs of the whole. Vonnegut’s ideal society resembles those in Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), where a totalitarian government enforces the social code, guaranteeing a unified collective. Such a conformist society also mirrors the socialist and communist societies of the Soviet Union and China, who, at the time Vonnegut’s story was published,

were seen as threats to the United States and to democratic institutions. Because it is so masterfully constructed and the subject so thoroughly satirized, Vonnegut’s story can be seen as both a critique of communism itself and a commentary on the increasing paranoia over communism in the United States, the paranoia rampant after World War II that fueled the cold war, during which both the United States and the USSR stockpiled nuclear weapons and spent enormous amounts of money developing “military intelligence,” which, for Vonnegut, would be an oxymoronic term. Similarly, the story also satirizes an American culture that devalues intellectualism while poking fun at those who challenge the status quo, for Harrison is an overachiever who questions authority and demands to be free of his handicaps. He speaks what no one else can or is willing to say. In this sense he is the novel’s protagonist, the one who propels the outrageous action at the end of the story, during which Harrison, after freeing the musicians of their handicaps, instructing them how to play the music correctly, and choosing one of the ballerinas as his empress, shows the world the meaning of the word dance. Harrison not only defies constitutional amendments in his dancing, but also defies the laws of gravity as he kisses the ceiling, a fantastic moment that signals his breaking free of the adamantine chains that have bound him. Yet, Vonnegut’s art prevents the story from becoming a simple moral lesson or political allegory. While Harrison is a rebel of great intellect, Vonnegut does not present him as someone to emulate. Instead, Vonnegut fashions an antihero in Harrison Bergeron, a seven-foot-tall Adonis who is a megalomaniac, crying, “I am the Emperor! Everybody must do as I say at once!” as he stamps his foot on the stage. Vonnegut achieves a great deal of ambiguity in this fantastic tale in which both the perpetrators of handicapping and those who rise above the handicaps imposed fall prey to Vonnegut’s satirical vision. Simultaneously a critique of institutions and thought systems that deny the individual expression, which do not admit intelligence, beauty, and grace, and a cautionary tale, rather than exalt the autonomous self, the story leaves room, with all of its ironies and careful juxtapositions, for

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the possibility of community. Thus, the story is at once comic and maudlin, optimistic and pessimistic, invested in individual freedom and cautious about the will of the individual left unchecked. By seeing how much lies within Vonnegut’s satirical grasp, readers can begin to appreciate the nature of satire, the form that showcases human follies of all sorts. The story did not receive any critical attention, however, until 1968, when it appeared in Vonnegut’s collection Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of 25 short stories written between 1950 and 1968. In a classic example of Vonnegut’s dark humor, Harrison’s parents are so enrapt with the television that they ultimately forget about the horrific death of their son, even though they have just seen it along with the rest of the news bulletin watchers. Like the rest of their dystopian society, the Bergerons are automatons controlled by the government and pacified by an insipid form of entertainment, that, as do the handicaps parceled out to those with intelligence, numbs the mind and distracts anyone who might conjure a contrary thought, any idea differing from the norm. Interestingly, the story was reprinted on November 16, 1965, in National Review, the political conservative magazine edited by William F. Buckley, Jr.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Why is the first line of the story significant? What does it suggest? What does it establish? 2. What do the United States Handicapper General agents do, and why do they do it? What threats to society do they target? What present circumstances in our society could lead to such absurdities? 3. What actual developments, policies, or trends does Vonnegut parody in the story? 4. Why is Harrison Bergeron such a threat to society? How has he been “handicapped”? 5. What is the significance of the dance that Harrison performs with the ballerina? 6. “Harrison Bergeron,” R AY BRADBURY’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and AYN R AND’s Anthem (1938) deal with conformist societies in which the government polices “equality.” First, compare the techniques the government uses in Bradbury’s

and Rand’s texts. What are the consequences of creating “equal” societies in both works?

Cat’s Cradle (1963) The novel’s title is taken from a child’s game called cat’s cradle, a series of string figures made of one’s fingers. While the game may explain the book’s strung-together, multichapter form, we do not learn of the game’s symbolic significance until the narrator/protagonist discusses it with a scientist’s son, whose father enjoyed playing the game and then taunting him, making him a disillusioned “little person” at odds with the world. Set in both the United States and a mythical Caribbean republic called San Lorenzo, where the military dictator, Papa Monzano, conspires with the inventor of the island’s religion, Bokonon, Cat’s Cradle has a simple plot. A writer researching a book on the bombing of Hiroshima contacts the three children of an atomic bomb scientist (Dr. Felix Hoenikker); journeys to San Lorenzo to speak with the middle child, Frank, who has become the minister of science and progress on the island; eventually meets all three Hoenikker children; falls in love with the island’s object of beauty, Mona; converts to the island’s religion of Bokononism; and witnesses the end of the world brought about by one of Dr. Hoenikker’s inventions: Ice-Nine. We arrive at the island of San Lorenzo and an understanding of the Hoenikker family, the religion of Bokonon, and the inhumanity of science through the eyes of the storyteller: a man named John who calls himself Jonah, a name with tragicomic biblical overtones. Jonah/John is obsessed with a single cataclysmic moment in human history: August 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped “Little Boy”—an atomic bomb possessing the power of 16 kilotons of TNT—on Hiroshima, Japan, killing more than 140,000 people. But, unlike the bombing of Hiroshima, the Book of Jonah in the Bible and Cat’s Cradle are comic stories. In the biblical story God sends Jonah to the sinful city of Nineveh to prophesy its destruction. Ironically, rather than make this trip, Jonah immediately boards a ship to

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another city (Tarshish). When God sees this, he creates a mighty storm. The other sailors on the ship realize that Jonah has incurred the wrath of God and throw him overboard, where, in the tempestuous seas, he is swallowed by a whale for three days and three nights. God then sends Jonah on this mission again; this time Jonah prophesies gloom and doom: the end of the world. Ironically, God saves Nineveh, making Jonah a failed, dejected prophet. There are many interesting comparisons here to be made. One lies in Vonnegut’s “outsider” status as a social critic; he is a kind of gloom-and-doom prophet whose warnings are not heeded. But, the story of Jonah also reveals the mystery of God: the strange way that justice, which is not absolute, lies beyond human understanding. In this way Jonah in the Bible, John/Jonah in his novel about the end of the world, Bokonon in his sacred books, and Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle perform prophetic roles for lost worlds, places where human beings, with their inward-focused vision and with their desire to control, lose sight of moral concerns. At the center of Vonnegut’s world and perhaps of Jonah/John’s karass—one of Bokonon’s terms, referring in this case to a group of people who, without knowing one another, are fated to complete or take part in a historical event—are the Hoenikker children, abandoned by their often nihilistic father, who invests himself fully only in science. The Hoenikker children live in a world without morals, a world where God is absent. Like spokes on a wheel, the Hoenikker children, all freaks of nature in one way or another, are obsessed with the doomsday substance their father has made, all covertly carrying pieces of it wherever they go. Angela, the eldest child, who is taken out of high school in her sophomore year to be a housekeeper and stand-in wife for her father, marries Harrison C. Connors, who desperately wants Ice-Nine. Her younger brother, Frank, who has lived in the basement of a hobby shop, has fashioned a perfect island country out of plywood, houses ants in a glass prison, and, as his father, has strong ideas but cannot face the public, becomes the minister of science and progress of San Lorenzo after bribing the dictator with Ice-Nine. Last is Newt, the youngest Hoennik-

ker child, who is psychically wounded by his cat’s cradle play time with his father, is sent to a school for grotesque children (Newt is a “little person”) and creates paintings that are cynical depictions of the meaninglessness of life. While these characters are over-the-top creations who are not found in the real world, they collectively show how modern society worships technology and science, how we all desire power and control, and how easily power and knowledge can corrupt and deform. As so many experimental novelists do, Vonnegut draws upon his own experiences in his creations. Significantly, Vonnegut’s idea for the novel originated in his time working for General Electric and his work with a particular scientist, whom Vonnegut satirized with the character of Felix Hoenikker. In a Paris Review interview, Vonnegut explains the genesis of the Felix Hoenikker character and “IceNine”: Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the absentminded scientist, was a caricature of Dr. Irving Langmuir, the star of the GE research laboratory. I knew him some. My brother worked with him. Langmuir was wonderfully absentminded. He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in. His most important contribution, though, was the idea for what I called “Ice-9,” a form of frozen water that was stable at room temperature. He didn’t tell it directly to me. It was a legend around the laboratory—about the time H. G. Wells came to Schenectady. That was long before my time. I was just a little boy when it happened—listening to the radio, building model airplanes. . . . Anyway—Wells came to Schenectady, and Langmuir was told to be his host. Langmuir thought he might entertain Wells with an idea for a sciencefiction story—about a form of ice that was stable at room temperature. Wells was uninterested, or at least never used the idea. And then Wells died, and then, fi nally, Langmuir died. I thought to myself: fi nders, keepers—the idea is

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mine. Langmuir, incidentally, was the fi rst scientist in private industry to win a Nobel Prize.

As with so many of his works, Vonnegut draws upon real world events and actual people in his farreaching social satires. Speaking to a generation of youth disillusioned by the Vietnam War and the cold war, Cat’s Cradle made Vonnegut a household name and the subject of many college-classroom discussions. The University of Chicago granted Vonnegut his master’s degree in anthropology many years after his original thesis was rejected, accepting Cat’s Cradle in its place. To grasp the significance of Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut’s first commercial success, we should think about the tradition of realism usually associated with the novel form. Especially in the late 19th century, American authors were concerned with verisimilitude, the appearance of reality in fiction and conforming to the long tradition of representation that Aristotle refers to in his Poetics as mimesis. Thus, Herman Melville, for example, provides pages and pages of taxonomical descriptions of whales—a sort of scientific grounding for his novel—at the beginning of Moby-Dick. With Cat’s Cradle, however, Vonnegut breaks from this tradition and creates an “antinovel,” an experimental form with no pretensions of realism (verisimilitude). For Samuel Beckett, Michel Butor, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, significant experimental novelists who prefigure Vonnegut’s work, the novel is an elastic form with which both authors play. In Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable (1953), for example, the world is eclipsed; we find ourselves in the mind of a head severed from its body, a head placed in a restaurant window beside the menu. Thus, the antinovel is often bizarre and absurd and relies on the reader to provide both concrete references and meaning. Characteristics of the antinovel include experiments with vocabulary, punctuation, syntax, variations of time sequence, alternate endings and beginnings, and collage, a form that allows authors to piece together discontinuous fragments. The antinovel can also lack plot, character development, and many other traditional elements we associate with literature. So, the question remains, What makes Cat’s Cradle an antinovel?

With its opening epigraph, “Nothing in this book is true,” both Vonnegut’s chosen line and an excerpt from the book embedded in the novel called “The Books of Bokonon,” the author breaks with the tradition of representing reality in fiction: Cat’s Cradle, as does the nonexistent religious text it frequently describes, announces its own status as artifice even before the narrative starts. This self-referential quality, as fiction calls attention to its own status as art, is a hallmark of what is often referred to as metafictional writing. Though many novels throughout the literary tradition exhibit some metafictional qualities, they predominate in contemporary fiction, especially in the works of authors such as Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, and others who are known for their breaking with the conventions of realism. Vonnegut’s novel about the end of the world contains a mixture of forms in its 127 short chapters, including parables, poetry, saints, and even sinners. It is a kind of Bible. Readers note the close resemblance of “The Books of Bokonon,” Lionel Boyd Johnson’s religious text in Vonnegut’s work, to the Book of Mormon, the sacred text purportedly dictated to Joseph Smith that forms the basis for the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Not only does Vonnegut make fun of Mormonism but of organized religion as a whole in this book, in which religious followers know they believe in lies and rub their feet in a sacred communion ritual. Thus, throughout the novel Vonnegut satirizes everything from religion to law to science to technology to nuclear proliferation to the cold war. Though Vonnegut’s works depart from the tradition of realism we associate with the conventional novel, his use of satire attempts to amend vices Vonnegut sees in our world, vices especially relevant to the period during which he was writing, when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a heated arms race and many Americans were beginning to protest the Vietnam War. According to Jonathan Swift, a writer considered to be one of the fi nest satirists in the English language, “Satire is a sort of looking glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for the kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very

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few are” (“The Preface of the Author”). Like Swift, Vonnegut is a master satirist who is often misunderstood. Satire is a flexible form that enables Vonnegut to replace the conventions of realism with grotesque characters, an unbelievable plot, and an apocalyptic setting, one where a technological creation of a scientist lacking a moral vision destroys the world. This scientist, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, helps form Vonnegut’s bitter assault on our obsession with science, technology, and progress. In the end, Cat’s Cradle is a work that can be described by the last lines of “The Books of Bokonon,” which are both chilling and hilarious. As Bokonon does, Vonnegut creates a history of human stupidity, one that challenges us to think about our foibles, horrifies us with our own destructive potential, shows us the bankrupt nature of social institutions and the many delusional aspects of organized religions, and leads us to reimagine our place in a world where, although there may be “No damn cat. No damn cradle,” we must create ways of living that are more humane and come to grips with the paradox central to Bokononist thought: “the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it” (284).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Read the Book of Jonah in the Bible. After reading this story, consider the literary allusion Vonnegut employs when he names Cat’s Cradle’s narrator Jonah/John. Why is this naming significant? What connections can you make between Cat’s Cradle and the Book of Jonah? 2. How does Vonnegut satirize organized religion in the novel? What does Vonnegut’s satirical portrait of religion accomplish; how is it significant? 3. Both Cat’s Cradle and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) deal with nuclear proliferation and the terror of the cold war. View the film Dr. Strangelove and consider the comedic approach both the movie and Vonnegut’s novel take toward this serious subject. Why do both employ humor? Why is their humor effective? What happens when writers and fi lmmakers use comedy to deal with serious issues?

4. The novel contains several artists and writers, including Newt Hoenikker, Julian Castle, and Jonah/John. Why does Vonnegut include these figures? Is Vonnegut making a statement about art, its meaning and purpose, by including such figures in his book? Consider Newt’s painting, Julian’s writings and paintings, and Jonah/John’s text. What do these things have in common? Why are the similarities and subject matter of their art significant to the novel as a whole? 5. Before the novel begins, Vonnegut provides a table of contents with many chapter names. Looking at the table of contents by itself, what connections can you make? Why would Vonnegut include the table of contents? Why is it significant that the book is composed of so many short chapters?

Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children’s Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death (1969) Slaughterhouse-Five tells the story of Billy Pilgrim, a middle-aged optometrist and World War II veteran who survives the Allied bombing of Dresden, Germany, with other prisoners of war in the underground cellar of a slaughterhouse-turned-syrupfactory operated by the Nazis. While the novel is never clear about whether Billy is sane or insane, and therefore either having unworldly adventures or hallucinating, the narrator details Billy’s life in the war, his abduction by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, his life on Tralfamadore—where he is kept in a zoo with Montana Wildhack, a movie star who births his child—and his public life after a plane crash from which he sustains a head injury. After his recovery and space travels, enlightened by the Tralfamadorans about the nature of living and dying and their conception of the interconnected, nonlinear nature of time, Billy preaches Tralfamadore philosophy to anyone who will listen. Although Billy’s story occupies the main part of the narrative, the book opens and closes with lengthy authorial intrusions, moments when Vonnegut speaks directly to the reader as “Kurt Vonnegut,” a man living, as is Billy, in upstate New York. By framing the book in this way, Vonnegut establishes that his experience as a

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prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden is the primary experience or confl ict around which the book is constructed. Furthermore, by equating the firebombing of Dresden with the Children’s Crusade of 1213, when 30,000 children journeyed to Palestine to wage war and most of them were either shipwrecked or sold as slaves, Vonnegut comments on the way that youth are called upon to fight wars whose causes and purpose they do not understand. The novel’s structure mirrors its content in many ways. As Billy becomes “unstuck in time,” shifting back and forth to pivotal moments in his life, the story is told with a radical narrative technique, one that presents often-painful moments in Billy’s life in a seemingly random order. In this respect the novel is an antinovel, one that thwarts readers’ usual expectations of what a novel may be. Additionally, Billy is an antihero, an innocent man who, as does Jesus, witnesses the world’s brokenness and becomes the victim of a tragic fate. Vonnegut identifies Billy with Jesus throughout the novel, most notably in the novel’s epigraph, an excerpt from the Christmas carol “Away in a Manger.” By associating these two Vonnegut presents the universal nature of Billy’s experience. Because it contains many elements of the genre, critics often refer to Slaughterhouse-Five as a science fiction work. As with many works of science fiction, the novel contains fantastic elements, surreal occurrences that defy the tradition of realism so often associated with the novel form and make it difficult for the reader to suspend disbelief, a process that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the author of such romantic poems such as “Kubla Kahn” (1798), says is necessary when dealing with literature. Thus, the novel defies usual expectations, presenting what Vonnegut refers to as a “schizophrenic” style that embodies Billy’s experience, his mental state, and the psychological malady often experienced by war veterans known as posttraumatic stress disorder. Significant because it deals with the Dresden bombing, an event often overlooked when examining the Allied forces’ role in World War II, the novel was written and published during the Vietnam War and makes one of the strongest antiwar statements in 20th-century literature. As does JOSEPH HELLER’s Catch-22 (1961), Slaughterhouse-Five conveys

the inhumanity of war and focuses on a key moment that has traumatized its central character. Vonnegut compares the firebombing of Dresden, during which more than 130,000 people lost their lives and the city was reduced to rubble, with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, an earth-shattering event that reveals the way that human beings of the technologically advanced 20th century, despite priding themselves on being “civilized,” behaved barbarically. By representing horrifying events and commenting on the ever-warring nature of human beings, Vonnegut offers a scathing critique of human history, which, from Vonnegut’s perspective, neither progresses nor moves toward a distinct goal and instead repeats itself in a terrifying cycle, at the center of which lie an unchecked will to power and the violent nature of humanity. In this sense the novel is a postmodern work of art, one that challenges accepted notions of truth, questions the nature of authority, and, rather than making meaning out of chaos and suffering, represents the fragmented nature of the modern world. Billy Pilgrim, surviving the masochist whims of Roland Weary (mock-hero named for Roland from The Song of Roland, an epic poem dating from A.D. 1000), the voyeuristic torture of the zoo-obsessed Tralfamadorans, the nightmarish barbershop quartet singing of the “Febs” (Four-Eyed Bastards), and the unthinkable devastation of Dresden, learns that the universe is really a bunch of spaghetti. Nothing is off limits for Vonnegut. He tackles everything from the ridiculous to the sublime, from Sears furniture to war, with a satirical blowtorch that scorches cherished institutions such as love, war, Christianity, and family life, all of which melt under his fire. Not unlike English satirist Jonathan Swift’s use of fantastical, imaginary societies in his novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Vonnegut creates Tralfamadore—a safely distant, make-believe world populated by beings from the “fourth dimension” who communicate telepathically and perceive all of spatial and temporal reality at once—to critique a modern myopia. Forming the central trope for the human blindness that Vonnegut so powerfully satirizes is the bombing of Dresden in 1945, one of the many atavistic horrors of the 20th century. Dresden’s bombing is

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an unspeakable memory, a psychological imprint that changes Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut. In dealing with this pivotal event, Vonnegut does not paint it in a melodramatic manner or try to make meaning out of what seems to be senseless. Instead, he makes a horrific event comic. While wars are not usually the stuff of which comedy is made, Vonnegut takes a German concentration camp, for example, and creates a fallen city. In this city, Brits and Americans battle continually over the correct, “civilized” way to comport themselves in time of war, and Billy Pilgrim appears as a pantaloon in an undersized jacket continually pursued by the avengers of Roland, who has announced to his fellow deportees, train-imprisoned and concentrationcamp-bound, that Billy is responsible for his death. Yet, this revenge quest is not tragic but comic, for Billy learns that life is a never-ending maze of simultaneity that can be entered at any point, place, and time. Thus, Billy’s own death, his assassination during a public lecture on space aliens that he has already witnessed in his time travel, is not a threat to him, but one thin strand in Billy’s own spaghettilike conception of life that can be nibbled at or eaten around with ease, an inconsequential act that does not cancel out previous moments or end life but merely forms one instance in a never-ending experience. Although Vonnegut is merciless, slamming institutions, entrenched beliefs, and values, Slaughterhouse-Five is a powerful affi rmation of life. It challenges the world’s myopic vision by presenting an alternative to our conceptions of history, truth, and godliness. Slaughterhouse-Five, therefore, is an engaging, provoking examination of our humanity, with all of its imperfections, which will engender strong readings for generations to come. The novel is widely viewed as Vonnegut’s most significant work. It earned him an international reputation and enabled him to record an experience that he had wanted to write about for 23 years. Furthermore, it provided an opportunity to experiment, to liberate his style from the previous conventions to which he felt bound. Coinciding with 1960s protests and the peace movement, the novel appealed to youth, those for whom the Vietnam War was an ever-present danger. The novel was adapted for a film produced by

George Roy Hill in 1972 and received critical praise. In commenting on war, human dignity, and genocide, Vonnegut also details the process of creating fiction and the inherent problems therein. By placing himself in the novel and by creating a science fiction novelist character, Kilgore Trout, whose works parallel the action of the book, Vonnegut reveals his anxiety about fiction making and the effectiveness of the techniques he employs. He creates a “selfreferential” text, one that comments on itself and on writing, that foils the expectations of readers and forces them to construct a cohesive story line from a disjunctive narrative. Despite its authorial intrusions and self-reflexive commentary, the novel relies on the reader. In this sense Vonnegut relinquishes control over the event that has haunted him and leaves the reader to make sense out of the atavistic past and of the increasing inhumanity of the Vietnam experience. As a work incumbent upon the reader for its construction and interpretation, Slaughterhouse-Five is not merely a platform for Vonnegut’s ideas. It is an artwork that sustains multiple readings, one that can be applied to many different situations, including the many contemporary confl icts in which the world continues to engage. As such, it remains a pivotal 20th-century American novel, a bold experiment in narrative form that addresses significant social issues. Because of its realistic and frequent depiction of what many consider to be foul language and sexually explicit content, Slaughterhouse-Five has been viewed as unfit for young minds. In fact, it is one of the most frequently banned works in American literature and has often been removed from school libraries and curriculums. Yet, many schools include the book as part of their curriculum and spend a good bit of time defending its worth. The Supreme Court of the United States even weighed the book’s merits in a landmark case, where it was one of the works scrutinized in Island Trees School District v. Pico 457 US 853 (1982). The novel appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 at number 69. Like Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, James Joyce, and many other great writers, Vonnegut is often misunderstood and accused of being a pessimistic, amoral writer. Yet,

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he remains one of America’s great satirists and most profound moral thinkers. Slaughterhouse-Five marks the beginning of Vonnegut’s fame and the launching of a long and illustrious career. This work, perhaps more than any of his others, challenges the status quo, causes us to rethink the way we live, leads us to imagine a new way of understanding our mortality, and shows us the brutality of war. To do all of this in the realm of comedy is no small feat. SlaughterhouseFive remains a testimony to Vonnegut’s humor and depth, his biting satire and compassion for humanity. As such it remains a vital, pertinent work from which we all can learn not only about the culture in which we live but also about the way we all attempt to survive with some sense of dignity. In the words of the novel’s litany, one that follows every death it accounts for: And so it goes.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Just as Vonnegut is best known for Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel that deals with war, so also are Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane known for war novels that help defi ne their writing style, their view toward humanity, and their vision of war. Read Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), the novel Edward Derby reads to Billy Pilgrim as he recovers in the hospital and is heavily sedated on morphine. Although the focus of these three novels is a specific war— World War II, World War I, and the Civil War, respectively—each uses different techniques to capture the war experience. With this in mind, fi rst compare and contrast each of the authors’ views on war. Next, compare and contrast the style, tone, characters, literary devices, and narrative techniques of the three novels. How does each novel help defi ne and/or express the time during which it was written? 2. Read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and compare it with Slaughterhouse-Five. How do these two novels represent war? What literary techniques and devices do both use? How does time sequence come into play in both, and why is that significant? 3. Research the bombing of Dresden and the bombing of Hiroshima. In terms of the information

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you find, is Vonnegut justified in saying that the Dresden bombing is “worse” than Hiroshima? Why or why not? Compare and contrast the tone and visual style of the movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) with those of other antiwar films, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Dr. Strangelove (1963), M*A*S*H* (1970), and Good Morning, Vietnam (1987). Vonnegut employs authorial intrusions in Slaughterhouse-Five, moments when he speaks directly to the reader. How does this affect the novel? What purpose do these intrusions serve? What does Billy learn from the Trafamadorans, and why is what he learns significant? Visit the American Library Association site on challenged or banned books (http://www.ala. org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challenged banned/challengedbanned.htm). After learning about why books are challenged, count the number of books by major American authors that have been challenged. What do you make of this? Evaluate SlaughterhouseFive and judge whether it is a suitable book for young adults. If so, at what age is the book appropriate to be taught?

Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday! (1973) Marking his return to the novel form as well as his recovery from a bout of depression, Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions as a “fiftieth birthday present” to himself, a therapeutic book. As Vonnegut stated in a 1973 interview with Playboy: Writers get a break in one way, at least: They can treat their mental illnesses every day. If I’m lucky, the books have amounted to more than that. I’d like to be a useful citizen, a specialized cell in the body politic. I have a feeling that Breakfast will be the last of the therapeutic books, which is probably too bad. Craziness makes for some beautiful accidents in art. (Conversations 109)

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These remarks betray the intensely personal nature of Breakfast of Champions, a work that also includes numerous authorial intrusions, so many that the line between author and character is blurred. Yet, despite the therapeutic value of the work for Vonnegut, Breakfast remains a biting, hilarious social commentary, a “tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet that was dying fast” (7). As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes in a New York Times May 3, 1973, review: He makes pornography seem like old plumbing, violence like lovemaking, innocence like evil, and guilt like child’s play. He wheels out all of the latest fashionable complaints about America— her racism, her gift for destroying language, her technological greed and selfishness—and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful, and lovable, all at the same time.

Vonnegut peppers this whimsical narrative with felt-tip pen drawings, all of which depict life on Earth, and plot descriptions for the works of the pulp-science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who, in this novel, is a spiritual guru for the Pontiac dealer Dwayne Hoover, an insane but wealthy businessman on a quest for truth, who, at one time, painted a 500-pound bomb to be dropped on Hamburg, Germany, with the following inscription: “Goodbye Blue Monday.” Incidentally, Hoover is also convinced that everyone on Earth aside from him is a robot. The action of the novel takes place in Midland City, Ohio—“The asshole of the universe”—as Trout has been invited to speak at the city arts festival. Trout arrives unshaven and fi lthy after hitchhiking from New York. During his travels he has been beaten and robbed. But, his disheveled appearance that day is usual. All the while, everyone is being watched over by an authorial presence from within the narrative who dictates their lives: Kurt Vonnegut. Trout and Hoover meet via Eliot Rosewater, an eccentric man of wealth, who idealizes Trout. As one might expect from Vonnegut’s scatological imagination, Trout publishes his novels through a pornographic press that fi lls his works with unrelated, sexually graphic illustrations. When he arrives

in Midland City, where antipersonnel bombs and body bags are manufactured, Trout fi nds a Holiday Inn where Hoover’s son, Bunny, is playing the piano at the bar. There, Hoover and the character Vonnegut wait. When they meet, Hoover, in a fl ight of frenzy, grabs one of Trout’s books, Now It Can Be Told, the story of an autonomous man alone in a world of humanoid robots placed there to amuse him. Luckily, Hoover is a speed reader and quickly makes his way through the book. Unfortunately, Hoover mistakes the plot for reality, becomes insane, hits Bunny, bites Trout’s ring fi nger, smashes Vonnegut’s watch, and crushes his big toe. At the end of the novel, Vonnegut reveals to Trout that he is his creator and that he intends to set him free. As they part ways, ostensibly for good, the narrative ends with Trout’s pleading with Vonnegut to make him young. Trout’s emancipation is a symbolically significant act, not only for Vonnegut, who, as he states, tries with the writing of Breakfast of Champions to “clear [his] head of all the junk in there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants,” but also for American society as Vonnegut envisions it (Breakfast 5). As Vonnegut tries to get rid of “all the junk,” he relinquishes his control of Trout. This emancipation signals not only the liberation of a character, but also the liberation of fiction, which, for Vonnegut, means rethinking fiction’s purpose and the relationship between the social world and art. Thus, the novel, with all of its stock characters, becomes a parody of the American experience, which, for Vonnegut, dehumanizes us, making of us mere automatons. These concerns become explicit in the last section of the novel, where the narrator/author intrudes, speaking directly to the reader: As I approached my fi ftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other

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so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. . . . Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done. (209–210)

Thus, as do Kilgore Trout’s novels, The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto or This Year’s Masterpiece, American people and art become items of economic exchange, created, used, and destroyed. What is lacking in Vonnegut’s depiction of America, beyond the nothingness of fast-food restaurants and neon-lit motels, is care: the redirection of the self’s inward vision. By attempting to release his characters, Vonnegut shows empathy for his creation, a level of concern that is sorely lacking in a world that values order more than people. Perhaps the only thing Breakfast gives us is a set of haunting questions designed to make us rethink our lives. After reading Breakfast, we may laugh at the musings of a 50-year-old author bent on pulling the world apart. We may see Vonnegut as a pessimist, but we cannot cease to wonder why we continue to perpetrate violent acts against one another, why we continue to destroy the planet, and why we cannot face the ugly specter of race.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Just as Ernest Hemingway, in his nonfiction book Death in the Afternoon (1932), intrudes into the narrative, so also is Vonnegut a narrative presence in Breakfast of Champions. These authorial insertions, on one level, deal with fiction making: its purpose, its end, and its relationship to the life of the author. Playing the same cat and mouse game literary critics do when they ascribe authorial intention to works, both Vonnegut and

Hemingway comment on the nature of interpretation. With these two works in mind, write a welldeveloped essay on the relationship between fiction and the life of its author. Should such a relationship be explored when studying literature? If not, why not? 2. Vonnegut uses Dwayne Hoover as an embodiment of American culture. With this in mind, write a well-developed essay on the traits Hoover exhibits and their relationship to Vonnegut’s satire of American social ills. 3. What effect do the numerous, often crude drawings scattered throughout the text have? How do the images affect your understanding of the novel? 4. The novel’s epigram is drawn from the Book of Job: “When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold” (Job 23:10). With this epigram in mind, relate Job’s view of God to the plots of Trout’s fiction. How can both be said to further an understanding of God’s purpose for human life?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON VONNEGUT AND HIS WORK 1. Vonnegut often comments upon the need for people to develop the imagining facility. Thinking about any of the works, how does Vonnegut comment upon the imagination and its significance? What characters either possess or lack an imagination, and why is this significant? 2. Although Vonnegut satirizes simplistic thinking and moralizing, he often writes about the need for moral accountability and the lack of responsibility in American society. Write an essay on responsibility as a theme in any of Vonnegut’s works. 3. Vonnegut laments the loss of community in America. Where do you see this played out in his works? What solutions does Vonnegut suggest for fostering community? 4. Vonnegut is often considered to be a great American satirist addressing social concerns. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is another famous American satirist. Compare and contrast one of

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Vonnegut’s works, such as Cat’s Cradle, with one of Twain’s, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) or his posthumously published novel The Mysterious Stranger (1916). What do Vonnegut’s and Twain’s work have in common? How do they differ? 5. If you enjoy Vonnegut, you will probably enjoy reading works of T. C. Boyle. Read a short story of Boyle’s such as “Modern Love.” What do you find that Boyle and Vonnegut share? How is their humor similar; how does it differ? 6. In several of his interviews and essays Vonnegut talks about meeting the reader’s needs, which he views as every writer’s responsibility. How do you see Vonnegut targeting our needs as readers? What can you learn from Vonnegut about your own writing? How can you incorporate elements of Vonnegut’s style so that your writing is compelling? 7. In Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction, Vonnegut gives “Eight rules for writing fiction”: ●

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Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. Every sentence must do one of two things— reveal character or advance the action. Start as close to the end as possible. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

With Vonnegut’s thoughts on writing in mind, assess his general style. Does he follow the rules he gives? If so, how effective is his writing? If not, why? 8. Many of Vonnegut’s novels emphasize the implausibility of humans’ ever fi nding a lasting peace: Violence, in Vonnegut’s fictional landscapes, is a prominent and inescapable byproduct of humanity’s technological and social being. After researching evolutionary biology and taking an ecotourism cruise with his wife to the Galápagos Islands, a small chain of islands in the South Pacific crucial to the studies of the naturalist Charles Darwin and his formulation of the theory of evolution, Vonnegut composed Galapagos (1985). The novel depicts a future when survivors of nuclear Armageddon, marooned on one of the islands in the Galápagos chain, evolve into peaceful seagoing creatures with smaller brains and fl ippers. Read Galapagos, a late Vonnegut work, and compare it with his earlier work Cat’s Cradle. Finally, write a well-developed essay that extrapolates Vonnegut’s worldview as he has aged. Would you consider Galapagos more optimistic? Why or why not? 9. If we consider Cat’s Cradle, SlaughterhouseFive, and Galapagos as works of science fiction (a literary form in which a background of science is integral, containing elements within the realm of future possibility), how is scientific theory central to Vonnegut’s works? How does Vonnegut use science in his novels? 10. On one level Vonnegut’s works are satires (a literary form that attacks human vice or folly through irony, derision, or wit). What elements of late-20th-century life do Vonnegut’s satires target? Why? WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Allen, William Rodney, ed. Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1988. ———. Understanding Kurt Vonnegut. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Boon, Kevin A., ed. At Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

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———. Chaos Theory and the Interpretation of Literary Texts: The Case of Kurt Vonnegut. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Bloom, Harold, ed. Kurt Vonnegut. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Bly, William. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1985. Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. 2d. ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Chernuchin, Michael, ed. Vonnegut Talks! Forest Hills, N.Y.: Pylon Press, 1977. Giannone, Richard. Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977. Goldsmith, David H. Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. Klinkowitz, Jerome. Kurt Vonnegut. London: Methuen, 1982. ———. “Papers Relating to Kurt Vonnegut: 1969– 1978.” University of Delaware Special Collections Department. Available online. URL: http://www. lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/klinkvon.htm. Accessed May 21, 2007. ———. Slaughterhouse-Five: Reforming the Novel and the World. Boston: Twayne, 1990. ———. The Vonnegut Effect. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. ———. Vonnegut in Fact: The Public Spokesmanship of Personal Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Leeds, Marc. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995. Leeds, Marc, and Peter J. Reed. Kurt Vonnegut: Images and Representations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000. Lundquist, James. Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Ungar, 1977. Marvin, Thomas F. Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. Mayo, Clark. Kurt Vonnegut: The Gospel from Outer Space. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1977. Merrill, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.

Morse, Donald E. Kurt Vonnegut. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1992. ———. Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Mustazza, Leonard, ed. Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1994. ———. Forever Pursuing Genesis: The Myth of Eden in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1990. Pieratt, Asa B., Julie Huffman-Klinkowitz, and Jerome Klinkowitz. Kurt Vonnegut: A Comprehensive Bibliography. North Haven, Conn.: Archon Books, 1987. Rackstraw, Loree, ed. Draftings in Vonnegut: The Paradox of Hope. Cedar Falls: University of Northern Iowa Press, 1988. Reed, Peter J. Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. Reed, Peter J., and Marc Leeds, eds. Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century: 1945 to the Present—Kurt Vonnegut.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http:// www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/ vonnegut.html. Accessed May 21, 2007. Schatt, Stanley. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Swift, Jonathan. “The Preface of the Author. The Battle of the Books.” Available online. URL: http:// www.gutenberg.org/files/623/623=h/623=h.htm. Accessed November 2, 2009. Vonnegut, Kurt. Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1999. ———. Interview by David Hayman, David Michaelis, Richard Rhodes. “The Art of Fiction 64.” The Paris Review 64 (Spring 1977). Available online. URL: http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview. php/prmMID/3605. Accessed May 21, 2007. ———. Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons. New York: Dell, 1974. Yarmolinsky, Jane Vonnegut. Angels without Wings: A Courageous Family’s Triumph over Tragedy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Blake G. Hobby

Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) A poem you don’t feel to your toes is not a very good one. But it also takes a person who knows how to feel to his toes to read a poem. (Interview with Alvin P. Sanoff)

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est known for his exploration of moral dilemmas and a changing South, the poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, educator, literary critic, and editor Robert Penn Warren was a towering figure in 20th-century American letters, a writer and thinker whose poetry, novels, and critical writings continue to influence the way Americans approach literary studies. As James A. Grimshaw, Jr., noted, Warren “earned every major literary award that this country bestows on its authors, published in every major literary genre, and in collaboration with his friend and colleague, Cleanth Brooks, helped changed the way literature was taught in this country before mid-century” (Understanding Robert Penn Warren 1). Warren collaborated with Cleanth Brooks on the seminal Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction, two volumes that inspired the literary world to reimagine how and why books are read, interpreted, and taught. He authored two Pulitzer Prize–winning collections of poetry and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the King’s Men (published in 1946; prize awarded in 1947), a political tale inspired by the career of the Louisiana governor and senator Huey P. Long. This work and its fi lm adaptation gave Warren fame. He changed the way we view literary texts, authored landmark novels, and channeled his passion into 15 volumes of poetry, the most significant of which was written and recognized in his late life, securing his place in the American literary canon.

Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Kentucky, on April 24, 1905, just 40 years after the Civil War ended, into a middle-class family and a segregated southern society. The fi rst child of Anna Ruth Penn, a schoolteacher, and Robert Franklin Warren, a businessman, Robert Penn Warren grew up on a Kentucky tobacco farm, hearing Civil War tales from his grandfathers, who had fought for the Confederacy. Warren was a precocious child who loved literature and southern history, which he commanded at an early age. As a teenager he had several selections appear in the Purple and the Gold, a monthly collection published at his high school in Clarkesville, Tennessee (1921). The same year, while reclining in his family’s backyard, he was accidentally struck by a chunk of coal his brother tossed and was blinded in his left eye. This incident ended Warren’s dreams of entering the U.S. Naval Academy. Instead, he entered Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, as a 16-year-old; there he had the good fortune of taking a freshman English class with John Crowe Ransom, a well-known literary critic who inspired Warren to become a man of letters. Ransom invited Warren to take advanced literature classes and asked him to join a group of Vanderbilt teachers and students and local businessmen who had been meeting informally since around 1915 to discuss trends in American life and literature. They called themselves the “Fugitives,” among whose illustrious members were Donald Davidson, John

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Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, Warren’s Vanderbilt roommate. By 1922, the year Warren joined the group, their discussions focused primarily on poetry and the purpose and use of literature. They also had founded a literary journal, the Fugitive, which featured criticism and poetry heavily influenced by classical verse and metaphysical poets such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell. The Fugitive published 23 of Warren’s poems in the three and one-half years the journal appeared. After graduating summa cum laude from Vanderbilt in summer 1925, Warren studied at the University of California, Berkeley (M.A. in English, 1927), where he met his future wife, Emma “Cinina” Brescia, then entered the Yale doctoral program before attending the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. During this time he published poems in a number of prestigious publications such as Poetry, New Republic, and Saturday Review of Literature and completed a biography, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (1929). The biography focuses on a man much like Warren’s later characters and contains themes that can be found in his later writing: Both All the King’s Men (1947) and Brother to Dragons (1953) feature characters who, as did Brown, follow personal ideals to murderous extremes. During this period Warren also produced his first extended piece of prose fiction, a novelette entitled Prime Leaf that would remain unpublished until it appeared in American Caravan IV in 1931. At Ransom’s request Warren also contributed an essay, “The Briar Patch,” to the anthology I’ll Take My Stand (1930), in which he rejected northern industrialism in favor of Old South agrarian values and a “separate but equal” southern society, one in which racial segregation continued. The essays in I’ll Take My Stand argued for a farm-based southern society, the sort of society that in Warren’s day was becoming a thing of the past. “The Briar Patch” addressed the role of African Americans in the agriculture-based economy. Importantly, he did not support “separate but equal” policies later in life and recanted the position he took in this early essay. Also in 1930, Warren began his teaching career at Southwestern Presbyterian College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, where he taught for one

year before transferring to Vanderbilt (1931), where he served as an assistant professor for three years. In 1934 Warren accepted an assistant professorship at the Louisiana State University (LSU), where his good friend Cleanth Brooks taught and with whom he helped found the Southern Review. The two coauthored An Approach to Literature (1936), Understanding Poetry (1938), Understanding Fiction (1943), and Modern Rhetoric (1949), all of which played a major role in the institutionalization of the New Criticism, an approach to interpreting literature that sees literary works as artifacts whose structure and substance should be analyzed without respect to social, biographical, and political details. This approach revolutionized the way literature was taught, emphasizing the form of literary works and close reading of texts. Even though current university scholars tend to scoff at the New Critical method, opting to view literature from the perspective of race, class, and gender issues, Warren’s methodology became the norm for generations of scholars and is still often the first approach taught children from grade school through high school and demanded on standardized college-placement tests. While at LSU, Warren also published the collection Thirty-six Poems (1936), containing such significant early works as “The Return: An Elegy,” “To a Face in the Crowd,” and the cycle “Kentucky Mountain Farm.” Rekindling what would be a lifelong interest in historical fiction and what he perceived to be the corrupt, fallen nature of our lives, Warren published his first novel, Night Rider (1939), a story set during the tobacco wars in western Kentucky at the beginning of the 20th century. Eleven Poems on the Same Theme appeared in April of that year; the collection included one of Warren’s most often anthologized poems, the Andrew Marvell–influenced “Bearded Oaks,” as well as “Original Sin: A Short Story,” a key work in understanding Warren’s view of humanity and our need for redemption. In the poem Warren describes original sin as a nightmare, one that accompanies us in our sleeping and waking hours. For Warren, original sin is not a terminal disease brought about by a lone, distant biblical ancestor (progenitor) but rather an internal reality: a weakness or sickness threatening to overcome us at any moment. This ominous,

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archetypal presence lurks in the shadows, residing in our subconscious and infecting our day-to-day lives. It is a primal force that must be dealt with, one that can only be combated by the often pained-filled journey within: the journey to understand the self. Original sin appears as a tragic flaw, woven into our lives. For Warren, we are single threads in a complex web; everything we do and touch ripples through the universe, affecting all of creation. This “web of being” is the central metaphor in his best-known text, the novel All the King’s Men (1946), a reworking of Proud Flesh, a play Warren had published seven years prior (1939). The year 1946 also marked the publication of “Blackberry Winter,” the often-anthologized work considered by many to be one of the finest short stories in American literature. The story describes a boy’s coming of age and his encounter with, as in Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, a shadowy figure who acquaints him with evil for the first time. “Blackberry Winter,” a classic initiation story like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” chronicles the movement from innocence to experience and focuses on the same themes and worldview that pervade “Original Sin” and All the King’s Men. Thus, “Original Sin,” All the King’s Men, and “Blackberry Winter” provide an excellent introduction to Warren’s oeuvre, demonstrating his command of divergent literary forms and the thematic continuity for which he is known. After occupying a brief post at the University of Minnesota and publishing another ambitious historical novel, World Enough and Time (1950), based on the 1825 murder of Colonel Solomon Sharp by Jereboam O. Beauchamp in Frankfort, Kentucky, Warren accepted a professorship at Yale, which he held until 1955. Warren and Cinina divorced on June 28, 1951. Warren remarried in 1952, this time to the writer Eleanor Crook, with whom he had a daughter, Rosanna Phelps Warren, in July 1953. In August 1953 Warren published the book-length verse drama Brother to Dragons, a work that chronicles a Kentucky slave owner’s brutal murder of his slave for a trivial offense. The work also marks a major turning point from Warren’s early concern for poetic form, as prescribed by Ransom, toward Warren’s later

poetry, which uses a freer approach to both rhyme and meter. Warren continued to be prolific in the 1950s, publishing the novel Band of Angels (1955), the nonfiction work Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956), and Promises: Poems, 1954–1956 (1957), for which Warren received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (1958). In 1965 Warren published a collection of interviews with African Americans entitled Who Speaks for the Negro, a collection that reflects a significant change in his views on race. In 1969 Warren published perhaps his most celebrated poem, Audubon: A Vision, in a single volume. Based on the five-volume Ornithological Biography of the painter and ornithologist John James Audubon, Audubon incorporates many of Warren’s favorite themes into a singularly powerful poetic vision. In September 1978 a new collection of poetry, Now and Then: Poems 1976–1979, appeared, for which Warren received his third Pulitzer Prize, his second for poetry. This trend of late-blooming creativity continued in Being Here: Poetry 1977–1980 (1980), Rumor Verified: Poems 1979–1980 (1981), and Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1983). Even the 1985 edition of his New and Selected Poems: 1923– 1985 contained a section of new poems entitled Altitudes and Extensions: 1980–1984, which features two of Warren’s best poems, “Mortal Limit,” a brief but powerful meditation on mortality and perception using Warren’s familiar hawk imagery, and “After the Dinner Party,” a portrait of two lovers seeking solace in each other. In February 1986 the Library of Congress appointed Warren the first official poet laureate of the United States. A volume of New and Selected Essays appeared in March 1989. Warren’s death of cancer on September 15, 1989, in West Wardsboro, Vermont, occurred less than a month after the birth of his grandson, Noah Penn Warren. According to James Grimshaw, “In his sixtyeight years of productivity, Warren wrote ten novels, sixteen short stories, seventeen volumes of poetry, seven plays and television dramas, five textbooks, eight books of nonfiction, two children’s books, and more than one hundred essays”—an extraordinarily prolific oeuvre that earned him “every major literary award that this country bestows upon its authors”

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(Understanding Robert Penn Warren 1). The prominent literary critic Harold Bloom argues that Warren is one of the “modern American poets who will be permanent in our literature,” and All the King’s Men remains one of the most highly regarded American novels of the 20th century (“Introduction” Collected Poems xxv–xxvi). As the works of this preeminent man of American letters continue to be read and his critical ideas continue to be debated, Warren’s singular literary voice refuses to be silenced. It rings out loud and clear for those who live what Socrates called the “examined life,” those seeking to understand the world, come to terms with the past, make sense of the present, and peer into their selves.

“Bearded Oaks” (1942) “Bearded Oaks” fi rst appeared in the collection Eleven Poems on the Same Theme. One of Warren’s most often anthologized poems, “Bearded Oaks” bears many of the characteristics of his early poetry, including a preoccupation with metaphysical poetry techniques known as conceits—a literary term that refers to elaborate, fanciful devices that often incorporate metaphor, simile, hyperbole, or oxymoron. In “Bearded Oaks” Warren uses many such conceits, including paradox and extended metaphor, and employs strict meter and rhyme schemes. The poem unfolds on both a literal and a metaphorical level. Literally, two lovers lie on the ground beneath oak trees watching light fi lter through the leaves; metaphorically, they lie on the bottom of the ocean, watching themes of human history unfold through a storm on the ocean’s surface. The poem’s first stanza sets its literal scene, describing how “layered light . . . swims” above the oaks (lines 2–3). The first part of the opening sentence with its unorthodox inversions recalls the poetry of John Donne: Its syntax demands that the reader pay close attention to the rhythms and content of Warren’s dense poetic language. The second stanza introduces the two individuals, who “now lie / Beneath the languorous tread of light” (2.1–2). The third stanza further extends the metaphor by

comparing the absence of light at the bottom of the sea with a sense of lying outside history’s confines. In the next three stanzas the pair watch from their vantage point outside time as a storm on the sea’s surface rages. The storm’s descriptions express the pain, violence, and meaningless slaughter found in human history. Even though they have withdrawn to the floor of the ocean, the lovers still feel the effects of the storm in the world above. The last half of the seventh stanza reveals their motives. By withdrawing to a silent space, the lovers have rendered concepts such as hope and fear meaningless, freeing them from the burden of history and individual responsibility The poem’s final three stanzas break from the extended argument of the previous five. In the eighth stanza the lovers almost hit a deer, a symbol of oneness with the natural world, while in the next stanza one lover directly addresses the other, proclaiming that their love remains meaningful despite their withdrawal from the world of sense and time. The final stanza focuses on the inevitability of our mortality and the brief span of our lives in comparison with eternity. While eternity makes our earthly struggle seem futile, it also inspires us to make the most of the limited hours we are given. From a cosmic perspective the moss-shagged oaks are also mythic, an Eden-like image recalling our painful fall from innocence into experience and the way love and language, though imperfect, grant us moments of understanding. Yet, despite their transience, these moments and brief glimpses form our connection to what lies the beyond to which the poet gestures.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The speaker in Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” uses a method of persuasion often referred to as carpe diem (seize the day) to seduce a woman. Compare and contrast the argument in “Bearded Oaks” with that found in Marvell’s poem. How does the ending of “Bearded Oaks” subvert the carpe diem form? 2. At this stage of his career Warren’s poetry was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece of modernist poetry The Waste Land (1922). Compare and contrast the imagery, themes, and

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content of “Bearded Oaks” with the “Death by Water” sequence from The Waste Land. 3. What is the significance of the memory recalled in the poem’s eighth stanza?

All the King’s Men (1946) Originally published by Harcourt, Brace in 1946, All the King’s Men received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and established Warren’s reputation as a novelist. The novel tells the story of Willie Stark, a corrupt politician who resembles Huey P. Long, “the Kingfish,” former governor of Louisiana and U.S. senator during the 1930s. Warren, however, cautioned against drawing direct parallels with Long, as he explains in the introduction to the 1953 Random House edition of the novel: One of the unfortunate characteristics of our time is that the reception of a novel may depend on its journalistic relevance. It is a little graceless of me to call this characteristic unfortunate, and to quarrel with it, for certainly the journalistic relevance of All the King’s Men had a good deal to do with what interest it evoked. My politician hero, whose name in the end, was Willie Stark, was quickly equated with the late Senator Huey P. Long, whose fame, even outside of Louisiana, was yet green in pious tears, anathema, and speculation. . . . For better or for worse, Willie Stark was not Huey Long. Willie was only himself, whatever that self turned out to be, a shadowy wraith or a blundering human being. . . . Now in making this disclaimer again, I do not mean to imply that there was no connection between Governor Stark and Senator Long. Certainly, it was the career of Long and the atmosphere of Louisiana that suggested the play that was to become the novel. But suggestion does not mean identity, and even if I had wanted to make Stark a projection of Long, I should not have known how to go about it. For one reason, simply because I did not, and do not, know what Long was like, and what were the secret forces that drove him along his violent path to meet the bullet in the

Capitol. And in any case, Long was but one of the figures that stood in the shadows of imagination behind Willie Stark. . . . Though I did not profess to be privy to the secret of Long’s soul, I did have some notions about the phenomenon of which Long was but one example, and I tried to put some of those notions into my book. (Introduction to All the King’s Men [New York: Random House, 1953])

Warren’s comments establish Long as an inspiration for the novel but also caution readers against either interpreting the novel in light of Long or trying to glean Long’s character from the book. It should be noted, however, that these comments are from a literary critic of the New Criticism school, which believed art works should stand alone and be evaluated without interjecting elements from “outside” the text. While Warren’s articulate defense of the novel should encourage all of us to consider the book outside a biographical framework, the “enveloping action”—the political climate of the time and the figure upon which Warren’s protagonist is roughly based—must be considered to appreciate both the novel’s many meanings and the critical sensation it created. Thus, anyone reading All the King’s Men would be well advised to consult a trustworthy information source and learn about Long, whose larger-than-life personality stands above and beyond Warren’s character (the Social Security Administration maintains one of the many excellent Internet sites on Long’s career: http://www.ssa.gov/history/ hlong1.html). The novel tells the story of Willie Stark, or “Willie Talos” in the Harcourt edition of the text fully restored and reintroduced by the literary scholar Noel Polk (textual editor of the works of William Faulkner). Polk’s edition follows Warren’s original intentions before the editorial process, during which, at the request of an editor, Warren changed the name from Talos to Stark. Talos is a symbolic name Warren took from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, book 5, in which Talus (a name Spenser drew from Talos in Greek mythology) is the “iron groom” who carries out punishments decreed by his master, Artegall, the knight of justice. In Warren’s novel, Jack Burden—a

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former journalist now hired, as Talus in the Spenser story, to accomplish the dirty work of a powerful political leader—narrates Governor Willie Stark’s story. As is often the case with literary works written from such a first-person perspective, the novel is also the story of the narrator, Burden, who fi nds in Stark a mirror image of what he as a young journalist may become. Thus, the novel is also a story of initiation and self-discovery. As Burden tells about Stark’s political machinations and observes his rise, fall, and death, he learns about himself and the complexity of moral thinking. Burden is something of a mystery detective who gradually pieces together clues. He, however, is what the critic Wayne Booth describes as an “unreliable narrator,” a mediating presence who inflects the action of the novel with his own biased perceptions. What makes the novel a great work of art is that it leaves room for us to fi lter Burden’s perceptions and interpretations and arrive at our own understanding of what takes place, what its significance is for Jack Burden, and what universal significance lies in Jack’s discoveries. As with the Greek demigod Epimetheus, who only understands matters in retrospect, Burden does not foresee the repercussions of his own misdeeds and is slow to piece together the significance of what Stark says and does. By presenting an unreliable narrator who works to understand his self and the story of his mirror reflection, Willie Stark, Warren enables readers to pass judgment on both Stark and Burden. At times aware of what they are doing and at other times not, both have a negative impact on history, where individual actions have a rippling effect. For Warren, history provides the perspective from which value judgments can be made. While Stark makes his mark as a reformer, he ultimately becomes an unscrupulous politician hungry for power. Yet, despite Stark’s evil deeds and selfaggrandizing schemes, he does accomplish things that benefit humanity, such as developing a massive interstate infrastructure, pouring money into public education, and building a free clinic. Such complex ethical situations leave Jack Burden and the reader to weigh good and evil. By showing how Jack becomes a political pawn— one of the king’s men—the novel focuses on Jack’s experience: the way he begins to realize his place in

the present and its relationship to the past. Importantly, the narrative never endorses one vision of reality; Jack is ambiguous about his own actions and interpretations and is ambivalent about Willie Stark. Yet Jack accepts “the awful responsibility of Time”: how his own ideas, actions, and words have meanings that affect everyone joined in the “web of being” (609). As the narrative progresses and as Jack learns about the complex web spun by the political world, the narrative details Willie’s disillusionment and many of the questionable decisions he makes. As do Sophocles’ Oedipus and many other tragic figures, Willie Stark fails to reach his potential. Ultimately, All the King’s Men explores such grand themes as the way history affects the present; the inherent dangers of power, which in the novel is portrayed as a corruptive, blinding force; the alienation of the individual in the modern world; and the duty we all have to understand ourselves, come to terms with our past, and accept responsibility for our lives and the ways they affect others. These themes emerge as Jack Burden realizes his identity against the mercurial rise and fall of Huey P. Long’s literary counterpart, Willie Stark. History functions in the novel as the backdrop against which Warren explores our lives and the tragic nature of the human condition.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Warren’s first draft of All the King’s Men began at the outset of Willie’s career rather than with his encounter with Judge Irwin. Why do you think Warren decided to alter the novel’s original sequence, presenting many of its events out of chronological order? What effect does this have on you as a reader? 2. The story Jack uncovers in his first “excursion into the past,” his dissertation on Cass Mastern’s journal, makes up a considerable portion of chapter 4 (224). How is this episode significant to the novel as a whole? How do the novel’s later events help Jack better understand why Cass accepts responsibility for Duncan Trice’s suicide? 3. The novel’s title is a literary allusion, a reference by one text to another text. The title refers to the third line of the popular Mother Goose rhyme “Humpty Dumpty”:

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Keeping the allusion in mind, discuss the meaning of the novel’s title.

“Gold Glade” (1957) “Gold Glade” first appeared in Promises: Poems 1954–1956, which received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1958. As several other poems in Promises do, “Gold Glade” draws on Warren’s memories of his boyhood in Guthrie, Kentucky, and his grandfather’s farm in Tennessee. While the speaker cannot remember the exact location, he remembers the powerful event—an encounter with a giant tree in the middle of a gold glade, which helped forge his relationship with the natural world. The speaker’s discovery of the giant tree is an encounter with the sublimity of nature that momentarily suspends his awareness of time. The speaker connects this momentary “freezing” of time with the “gold light” the giant tree radiates. Faced with the overwhelming image of this gold light, the speaker asserts, “There could be no dark,” a sentiment he knows to be untrue yet cannot help but express given the extraordinary nature of his encounter. The next line reveals that the speaker is aware that the vision is temporary. Interestingly, however, the speaker insists that the image can be found “in no mansion under earth, / Nor imagination’s domain of bright air, / But solid in soil that gave it its birth,” suggesting that the feeling of timelessness he experienced originated in the natural world itself rather than his own creative imagination (7.1–3). “Gold Glade” uses the poet’s memory as a springboard for complicated musings on the relationships among perception, time, and the creative act. Though Warren sets the scene for his speaker’s epiphany with detailed descriptions of “the woods of boyhood,” the poem undercuts the authority of the speaker’s memory by noting in the sixth stanza that he is unsure as to whether the memory originated

in childhood experiences in Kentucky or Tennessee. Though the gap in time between Warren’s boyhood experience and his writing “Gold Glade” in the late 1950s is considerable, we can also interpret this as Warren’s reminder that “Gold Glade,” like all literary remembering, is an attempt to (re)construct experience through language. For the speaker to have any hope of reliving his childhood vision, then, he must return to the place where it occurred, as he resolves to do in the poem’s final line: “I shall set my foot, and go there” (7.5).

For Discussion or Writing 1. The last line of “Gold Glade” recalls the first line of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which also concerns a speaker’s relationship to an idealized location in the natural world. Compare and contrast the attitudes the speakers in each poem adapt toward nature as well as the language each poet uses to describe the natural world. 2. In Poems of Pure Imagination the critic Lesa Carnes Corrigan connects the vision Warren describes in “Gold Glade” with the phenomenon described by the English romantic poet William Wordsworth in his work The Prelude as “spots of time.” Research Wordsworth’s concept, then compare and contrast “Gold Glade” with Wordsworth’s “Tinturn Abbey,” considering imagery, themes, and content. 3. Warren wrote “Gold Glade” during the height of the Civil Rights movement. While Warren addresses the issue of race at length in many of his essays, poems, and novels, “Gold Glade” can be read as a sort of elegy for an idealized version of the U.S. South in which the suffering of African Americans was underrepresented, if not ignored. Do you feel that authors have an obligation to create art that explicitly addresses contemporary political issues? Why or why not?

Audubon: A Vision (1969) A creative reimagining of the painter and ornithologist John James Audubon’s life, Audubon: A Vision,

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perhaps one of Warren’s most celebrated poems, first appeared as a single volume in 1969. Warren based the poem on Audubon’s five-volume Ornithological Biography (1831–39), though Warren departs from that work at several points. One of his longest verse works, Audubon contains seven free verse poems (each with lettered subsections) totaling roughly 440 lines, in which Warren explores the way identity, time, history, perception, knowledge, and creativity are related. In the preface Warren provides general information on John James (Jean-Jacques) Audubon and recounts the apocryphal legend that Audubon was the “Dauphin,” the son of the dethroned Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette (although Warren does not mention it, a con man calls himself “The Dauphin” in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). As Grimshaw points out, the opening poem, “I. Was Not the Lost Dauphin,” details one of Audubon’s many contradictions: “Audubon’s ethical quandary involves the necessity of killing birds so that he can study and paint them. His moral sentiments against destroying the birds are pitted against his aesthetic impulse to represent their beauty in art” (Understanding Robert Penn Warren 147). This stanza closes with a key rhetorical question, one that is reminiscent of the chorus’s “Ode to Man” in Sophocles’ Antigone. While in Sophocles’ play man is the chief wonder of the world, in Warren’s the central wonder is man’s passion (“what / Is man but his passion?”), a force that inspires creativity, discovery, but also a driving, blind force like evolution, enabling Audubon to justify death as a part of the creative process. Yet, the poem also depicts Audubon’s conflicted self, which weighs ethics and aesthetics: the sanctity of life and the impulse to create art. Thus, this first poem in the cycle deals with ethical issues in the creation of art and the pursuit of passion at a great cost: the loss of the very subject being explored. A creative and destructive force, art becomes Audubon’s way of negotiating the world and of creating a sense of self. The second poem functions as the narrative and thematic heart of Audubon. Audubon happens upon a cabin, whose owner, an old woman, resolves to kill him with the help of her two sons after Audubon

flashes a gold watch to prove he can afford a room. A one-eyed Indian alerts Audubon to the owner’s plot, and three travelers appear just as Audubon is about to be murdered, saving him. The woman and her sons are sentenced to death; just before she is hanged, Audubon has a mystical vision, an epiphany about the connectedness of all things. The next two poems chronicle Audubon’s continued artistic endeavors and death before shifting in the fifth poem to philosophical ruminations that persist until Audubon’s conclusion. The last of Audubon’s seven poems records thoughts of Warren’s childhood and ends as the poem’s speaker asks an unnamed audience, “Tell me a story of deep delight,” a command that invites us to connect Warren’s writing and Audubon’s art.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Choose at least two themes from the following list and discuss how Warren addresses them in Audubon: A Vision: the search for knowledge, the need to understand history, the passage of time and its effects, the formation of individual identity, and the Fall and its reversal. Now describe how the themes you chose are themselves interrelated in Audubon. 2. Warren expresses a desire in both Audubon: A Vision and “American Portrait: Old Style” to learn “the name of the world” (II.G.5). Explore the significance of this question in relation to similarities (thematic or otherwise) between the two poems.

“American Portrait: Old Style” (1976) “American Portrait: Old Style” first appeared in the August 23, 1976, issue of the New Yorker; it was later included in Now and Then: Poems 1976–1978 (1978), which earned Warren his third Pulitzer Prize (his second for poetry). Warren divided Now and Then into two sections: “Nostalgic,” which focuses on Warren’s past, and “Speculative,” in which, as James H. Justus describes in The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren, “the speaker struggles to reconcile rational assessment of the past and the knowledge it brings with more tentative and subliminal asser-

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tions of meaning experienced in dream states and near-mystical moments” (100). The collection often contains powerful, revelatory moments from Warren’s youth—memories or “psychological imprints” that helped develop his imagination and inspired him to write about in late life. As Lesa Carnes Corrigan argues, “In Now and Then, Warren’s desire ‘just to know’ manifests itself not only in the poet’s forays into the realm of memory but also in intense, suspended moments of revelation experienced in the world of nature” (147). Thus, the first poem in the “Nostalgic” section—“American Portrait: Old Style”—recounts Warren’s memories of time spent with his childhood friend Kent Greenfield (referred to in the poem as “K”), about whom he had already written in the short story “Greenwood Comes Back.” In many ways, however, the poem is more than an autobiographical sketch. It returns to familiar Warren themes: our personal relationship with history, the fictionlike nature of memory, the inevitability of change, and the power of the imagination, represented by the childhood games Warren and K play and in the poem’s subject matter and form. In the third of the poem’s nine sections Warren states that “in that last summer / I was almost ready to learn / What imagination is—it is only the lie we must learn to live by, if ever / We mean to live at all.” For Warren, childhood is not only an idyllic time to be remembered nostalgically; it is also a time when the imagination—the faculty that gives our lives meaning and enables us to love—develops. But this poem not only records Warren’s early love of the world; it also chronicles his embittered response to aging, to the lost dreams of youth, and to Kent’s habitual drinking that lost him a baseball career. Such a loss parallels the loss of meaning that maturity can often cause. Even though the poem deals with the anger that often accompanies disillusionment and the sorrow we feel with the passing of youth, the poem also looks to the future with hope, reflecting that “even in anger” the speaker loves the world.

For Discussion or Writing 1. The “imagination” Warren describes as “the lie we must learn to live by” can be seen to include

the imaginative act of writing poetry. Explore how Warren’s descriptions of his childhood games with K (such as “we had to invent it all,”) can be seen to comment upon Warren’s attempt to “create” his own personal “history” through writing “American Portrait: Old Style.” 2. Though most of the poem is free verse, its fi nal section breaks into rhyme. Explain why this sudden shift in the poem’s form is significant to its content. 3. Read Robert Frost’s poem “Birches” and then compare the way it, as does “American Portrait,” treats youth, maturity, understanding, and love.

“Evening Hawk” (1977) “Evening Hawk” fi rst appeared in a series of 10 new poems, Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand? from the collection Selected Poems: 1923–1975. In six stanzas of varying length Warren describes movement through space in free verse with swooping rhythms that depict fl ight. Like birds, stars, and suns in Warren’s late poetry, the hawk (and later the bat in the poem’s third stanza) is sublime, a romantic image of aweinspiring beauty and a divine presence that reaps stalks of grain “with the gold of our error” as it descends (2.1). Ironically, as Harold Bloom points out, “What is being harvested is our fault, and yet that mistake appears as golden grain” (204). Such a paradox has biblical overtones, the sort of transformative regeneration and rebirth that Jesus describes as the “harvest” in the “parable of the seed that grows mysteriously”: He also said [to the disciples], “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” (Mark 4: 26–29 Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Edition)

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The purpose of this parable is to teach the disciples about the Kingdom of God, which Jesus describes in the fourth chapter of Mark as a mysterious plan connected with the sowing of the word: the use of language, in this case the parable, but in Warren’s case, the poem, to communicate mystery, to draw the listener/reader into an experience that defies rational explanation. Jesus employs the image of the harvest, a time of celebration in which the fruits of the earth are reaped, to instill hope in the disciples, who are experiencing a crisis of faith. “Evening Hawk,” as the Mark parable, describes an unbelieving world that lies under the shadow of the hawk’s wing. As in the parable, Warren’s poem describes a fallen world under the gaze of a divine presence that reaps the harvest: the Hawk’s wings cut (“scythe”) like “that of a honed steel-edge” (1.2). In Warren’s poem humanity, unforgiven, is set apart, capable of witnessing sublimity but unable to climb the last light, cut off from transcendence, timelessness, the very things to which the poet aspires but can never attain. In the third stanza the hawk is replaced by a bat, whose “wisdom / Is ancient, too, and immense” and “Who knows neither Time nor error,” and does not participate in the process of decay known as history, an experience endemic to the human race, one we live as imperfect beings caught in the field of time, forever erring, forever falling short of a platonic ideal. For Warren, we exist in a world grinding on its axis, a place where we labor, as does Sisyphus, who forever pushes the rock up an incline in Hades, only to see it fall and then begin the cycle anew. Yet, such visions as the hawk flying at sunset frame our existence, providing the ultimate horizon—whether we name it death, faith, belief, salvation, nothingness, or God—that defi nes our lives.

For Discussion or Writing 1. “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins is another poem that attempts to approximate the rhythms of flight through innovative use of poetic meter. Read both poems aloud; notice where they speed up and slow down. Now compare Hopkins’s usage of meter with Warren’s, noting how each affects you as a reader.

2. Despite the images of forgiveness in the second and third stanzas, the fourth stanza describes the hawk’s eye as “unforgiving” and refers to the world as “unforgiven.” Why do you think this is? In what way(s) do these lines make reading the hawk as a Christ figure problematic? Do they render a reading so ambiguous as to be impossible, or does the ambiguity enhance your experience as a reader?

“Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” (1980) “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” fi rst appeared in the collection Being Here: Poetry 1977–1980 (1980). In the fi nal part of this collection, from which this poem is drawn, the poetic voice describes life in old age, the “autumn” of our lives. The poem is written in free verse, without regular rhyme or metrical patterns, and its lines and stanzas vary in length. The fi rst-person speaker whose voice we hear contemplates the nature of time, the nature of the self, and the changing seasons. For the poem’s speaker, human life cannot be conceived apart from time, rendering us unable to comprehend it in its purest form. True insight into the nature of time remains just outside our understanding, beyond our grasp. Throughout the poem Warren uses philosophical language concerned with what our lives mean, our existence—the reality philosophers often refer to as being. In “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” Warren ruminates on how we understand and experience our own mortality and how we, as the natural world does, change. It is one of the Warren poems that treat the exploration of the self in a time-bound world and explore the paradox of living in a world to which we have no permanent connection. The natural world, with its changing seasons, may mirror the stages of our lives, but, as with God, we cannot communicate with it; our language, including poetic speech, always falls short. For the speaker of the poem, we live a bound life controlled by time and limited by language. This awareness causes the speaker to react with

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anger and a bitter hatred for the one who fashioned the universe this way: God. Warren uses a series of images from nature to explore complex philosophical issues, drawing comparisons between nature and our lives. The speaker lies floating in a “a mountain pool,” looking up at “one lone leaf” (3.19–20). The leaf is a symbol, something that signifies an idea or object beyond itself: in this case, the universal journey from birth to death mediated by time. The tree that the leaf hangs from symbolizes life, while the cold black water that the speaker lies on symbolizes death. The leaf dramatizes the passage from birth to death when, in stanzas 7 and 8, it detaches and floats down to the water. In “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn” the speaker both savors and laments time’s passing, celebrating the natural beauty brought about by seasonal change and simultaneously regretting mortality, the change time inevitably causes. Warren expresses time’s polar extremes in the poem’s final stanza, which describes life using a metaphor of currency: Life is the “payment” given by the “heart,” a “dime-thin, thumb-worn, two-sided, two-faced coin” (11.1). For Warren, to live is to deal with change and passing: the movement of time, which is at once active, alive, and also decaying, moving toward death, something expressed by the coin’s two-sidedness in the poem’s last lines.

For Discussion or Writing 1. According to the poem, how do the seasons reflect our lives? 2. If on one level the poem is about becoming aware of death, what truths does the poem tell us? What significance does the awareness of mortality have? 3. What is it that the water’s “one cold claw” releases in line 28? Why do you think the persona chooses to describe it as “a single drop?” How does this relate to the water symbolism throughout the poem?

“After the Dinner Party” (1985) “After the Dinner Party” first appeared in New and Selected Poems: 1923–1985 (1985). The poem consists

of seven four-line stanzas (quatrains), with an abab rhyme scheme. In the first line the speaker addresses the two party hosts directly, referring to them as “You two.” In the silence following the party’s conclusion the hosts sit and remember; the poem’s speaker describes the two from an objective perspective and lets us know what thoughts and images run through their minds. As with the fugitive gatherings Warren attended in his youth, the guests have shared “food, wine, laughter, and philosophy,” a communion that is physical and spiritual. But rather than focus solely on the party guests, “After the Dinner Party” dwells with the two hosts and describes, through the construction of a story line (a “narrative”) and through poignant images, the way they relate to each other. In this sense, “After the Dinner Party” is a love poem, one that enshrines an aging couple as they sit, think, ascend the stairs to bed, and hold each other’s hands. “After the Dinner Party” also contains many of the themes for which Warren is known: the relationships among memory, death, language, and the passage of time. While the hosts’ thoughts turn to past parties whose guests have passed away, we see how these former guests live on in the words and minds of those who remain. The image of a group of smiling, laughing friends dramatically changes as one of the hosts imagines their deceased friend’s corpse, a horrifying image that, with the poem’s other death imagery, conjures both a feeling of nostalgia for things already gone and a premonition of things that will soon fade away. With its images of mortality and of social and physical intimacy, the poem laments loss: of friends, community, youth, and conversation. In its silence the poem speaks of fullness, the sense of fulfillment that past experiences have given and present memory now gives. On one level, the poem, written near the end of Warren’s life, reflects on his career as a scholar, writer, teacher, father, and husband. But, on another level “After the Dinner Party” dwells on a universal feeling of nostalgia, the bittersweet taste of fulfi llment we know in memory that generates both life and death, pleasure and pain, words and silence, causing us to savor the present while also making us yearn for the past. On this level the poem asserts that no mat-

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ter how much we fear loss, yearn for those who have passed, and fail to capture our feelings and thoughts in language, we still must love. Even though the two hosts venture together toward a sleep that eerily resembles death, “one hand gropes out for another, again”; they seek solace in each other’s embrace, the tenuous feeling of community possible in a transient world, a world of feasting and of fasting, a world of plentitude and emptiness.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare the relationship the two hosts share in “After the Dinner Party” with the connection the two lovers share in John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” How are both relationships symbolic? How can both writers be said to be “metaphysical” poets? 2. First locate metaphors and images that relate to death in the poem and then compare and contrast how aging and death are portrayed in this poem with the way they are presented in Warren’s “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn.” How does that poem’s metaphorical description of life in the latter as the “payment” given by the “heart,” a “dime-thin, thumb-worn, two-sided, two-faced coin,” relate to the hosts’ view of death in “After the Dinner Party”?

“Mortal Limit” (1985) “Mortal Limit” first appeared in Altitudes and Extension: 1980–1984, a collection of new poems included in the anthology New and Selected Poems: 1923–1985. Were it not for its long lines, “Mortal Limit” would be a textbook example of a Shakespearean sonnet: It consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. In the poem an unnamed speaker watches a hawk disappear above Wyoming’s Teton mountain range. The speaker contemplates what effect the hawk’s high altitude has on its perception, wondering whether upon “tasting that atmosphere’s thinness” it will “Hang motionless in dying vision before / It knows it will accept the mortal limit” (3.1–3). Having reached this tenuous insight, the speaker seems on

the edge of a breakthrough in understanding the hawk. The vision remains incomplete; however, the line ends abruptly, and the brief final stanza consists of four attempts to finish the thought, none of which seems to satisfy the speaker. The fi rst stanza describes the hawk’s mystical ascent. The hawk reaches into a sublime space, one where transcendence appears on the horizon. Yet Warren does not allow the speaker access to what lies beyond. Instead, the speaker must imagine the hawk’s vantage point, which, while encompassing the unknown, is still constrained by its limits: its ability to fly and the constant pull of gravity. In this way the hawk may be seen to represent the human condition and the imagination, the facility with which human beings contemplate their limits in the field of time and endeavor to express what language cannot capture. Thus, the poem deals with poetry’s possibilities and limits, its potential and ultimate inefficacy. Poetic language functions in the poem as a vehicle that helps us approach physical, sensory experiences other than our own. Though the speaker does not directly experience the hawk’s heightened perception, he can imagine the hawk’s view through language, as in the question that concludes the second stanza: “Beyond what range will gold eyes see / New ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?” (2.3–4). Despite this capability, however, poetic language appears incapable of describing what lies beyond the “mortal limit” of death, a failure manifested in the poem’s form by the break between the third and fourth stanzas. The grand unifying vision promised in line 12 remains incomplete; death lies beyond our ability to grasp or articulate, transcending poetic expression.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast “Mortal Limit” with “Evening Hawk,” another poem by Warren that details the flight of a hawk. In what ways is the hawk’s heightened physical perception linked with the two poems’ poetic and philosophical insights? 2. Both William Butler Yeats in his poem “The Second Coming” and Warren in “Mortal Limit” use gyrating images. Compare and contrast the

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ways that both authors deal with spiraling movement and the significance this movement has for the works. Also consider the Rainer Maria Rilke poem “I live my life in growing orbits,” which uses similar images. Why do all three employ dizzying (vertiginous) images?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WARREN AND HIS WORK 1. In “The Briar Patch,” an early essay from the proagrarian collection I’ll Take My Stand (1930), Warren supports racial segregation. Warren recanted this position, however, in Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956) and Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965), a collection of interviews Warren conducted with African Americans. Research Warren’s views on segregation by examining relevant passages from these texts and the interview collection Talking with Robert Penn Warren (1990); also consider consulting a biography or trustworthy Web site. How does the information you uncovered affect your views regarding Warren’s creative work? Do you consider such changes desirable? Why or not? 2. Several critics have noted that in much of Warren’s work original sin is presented as the capacity for evil inherent in human nature. With this in mind, examine Warren’s explorations of the theme in “Original Sin: A Short Story” and “The Ballad of Billie Potts.” In what ways do these poems reinforce this understanding of original sin? In what ways do they challenge it? 3. Warren was instrumental in the rise of a movement in literary criticism known as New Criticism; Understanding Poetry (1938), the textbook he coauthored with Cleanth Brooks, contributed greatly to its institutionalization. In the following excerpt from the prefatory Letter to the Teacher from Understanding Poetry, Brooks and Warren discuss one of the central tenets of New Criticism, focusing on “the text itself”: Paraphrase may be necessary as a preliminary step in the reading of a poem, and

a study of the biographical and historical background may do much to clarify interpretation; but these things should be considered as means and not as ends. And though one may consider a poem as an instance of historical or ethical documentation, the poem in itself, if literature is to be studied as literature, remains fi nally the object for study. Moreover, even if the interest is in the poem as a historical or ethical document, there is a prior consideration: one must grasp the poem as a literary construct before it can offer any real illumination as a document.

Consult the New Critic John Crowe Ransom’s essay “Criticism Inc.” and, if necessary, relevant sections from a supplementary work or reliable Web site regarding New Criticism. Weigh the advantages and disadvantages of considering literary texts in and of themselves as opposed to placing them within a specific context, such as the author’s biography or the historical context(s) in which it originated. What do you feel is gained or lost by considering poetry from this approach? With All the King’s Men in mind, think about how this method of reading might apply by briefly researching the life of Huey Long, the real-life model for the character of Willie Stark. Would reading All the King’s Men as a literary representation of Long’s life be more fruitful than as a novel apart from that historical context. In your view, which way of reading helps you better understand the novel? Why?

WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Bedient, Calvin. In the Heart’s Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren’s Major Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Robert Penn Warren. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Blotner, Joseph. Robert Penn Warren. New York: Random House, 1997. Bohner, Charles. Robert Penn Warren. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

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Brosi, George. “Robert Penn Warren.” KYLit—a Site Devoted to Kentucky Writers. October 5, 1997. Department of English and Theatre. Available online. URL: http://www.english.eku.edu/SERVICES/ KYLIT/WARREN.HTM. Accessed July 16, 2006. Chambers, Robert H., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of All the King’s Men: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977. Corrigan, Lesa Carnes. Poems of Pure Imagination: Robert Penn Warren and the Romantic Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Cowan, Louise. The Fugitive Group: A Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959. Cullick, Jonathan S. Making History: The Biographical Narratives of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Grimshaw, James A., Jr. Robert Penn Warren: A Descriptive Bibliography 1922–79. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981. ———. Understanding Robert Penn Warren. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Guttenberg, Barnett. Web of Being: The Novels of Robert Penn Warren. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1975. Jancovish, Mark. The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Justus, James. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Koppleman, Robert S. Robert Penn Warren’s Modernist Spirituality. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Madden, David, ed. The Legacy of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Ransom, John Crowe. “Criticism Inc.” Virginia Quarterly Review 13 (Autumn 1937): 586–602. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 7: Early Twentieth Century— Robert Penn Warren.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/ english/reuben/pal/chap7/warren.html. Accessed June 28, 2006. “Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989).” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.

english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/warren/warren. htm. Accessed June 28, 2006. Runyon, Randolph Paul. The Braided Dream: Robert Penn Warren’s Late Poetry. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. ———. Ghostly Parallels: Robert Penn Warren and the Lyric Poetic Sequence. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Standberg, Victor H. A Colder Fire: The Poetry of Robert Penn Warren. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1965. ———. The Poetic Vision of Robert Penn Warren. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977. Stewart, John L. The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. Szczesiul, Anthony. Racial Politics and Robert Penn Warren’s Poetry. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Walker, Marshall. Robert Penn Warren: A Vision Earned. Edinburgh, Scotland: Paul Harris, 1979. Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. New York: Harcourt, 2001. ———. The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. ———. Democracy and Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. ———. “Knowledge and the Image of Man.” Sewanee Review 63 (Spring 1955): 192. ———. Segregation, the Inner Conflict in the South. New York: Random House, 1956. ———. Who Speaks for the Negro? New York: Random House, 1965. Warren, Robert Penn, and Cleanth Brooks. Understanding Fiction. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979. ———. Understanding Poetry. 4th ed. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1976. Watkins, Floyd. Then and Now: The Personal Past in the Poetry of Robert Penn Warren. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. West, Paul. Robert Penn Warren. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964.

Blake G. Hobby and Christopher M. Watson

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within. (Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings)

E

udora Welty is so much associated with Mississippi in particular and the South in general that it may be surprising to learn that she was not the descendant of a long line of Mississippians; her parents were in fact relatively recent immigrants to that state at the time Welty was born. Her mother had been born and raised in West Virginia, her father in Ohio, but Welty herself grew up in the South and imbibed its sounds, sights, and smells in a way that allowed her to achieve, in her fiction, an incomparable feel for the place and its people. Yet, Welty is no mere regionalist; as did many of the greatest writers of the 20th century (a number of them, as she was, born and bred in the South), she drew on a specific local habitation to deal with timeless human experiences, emotions, and concerns. She lived much of her life in a relatively small southern city, but her vision was both wide and deep. Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi (the state capital). Her parents—Chestina Andrews Welty and Christian Webb Welty—had already lost one child at a very early age, and Welty’s own mother had come close to dying herself. These experiences undoubtedly helped lead to an especially close bond with her parents and her younger brothers, Edward and Walter (who arrived in 1912 and 1915, respectively). Welty’s mother and father seem to have enjoyed an unusually loving marriage; many of Welty’s earliest memories involve reminiscences of overhearing her parents talk in the gently intelligent

tones that obviously helped shape Welty’s own voice and persona. Having suffered loss and near-loss, her parents had a deep appreciation of each other and of their surviving children, and Welty’s accounts of her early life are full of recollections of parental devotion and self-sacrifice. Both parents valued learning, both were inveterate readers (although the father favored factual books while the mother leaned toward fiction), and both encouraged Welty’s own early enthusiasm for reading and writing. The house was brimming with books, which became some of Welty’s earliest friends. Welty began first grade at Jefferson Davis Elementary School in January 1915, but by the time she was seven, she was diagnosed with a rapid heartbeat—a fact that meant she had to stay at home in her parents’ big bed, where she could read to her heart’s delight, watch life from an upstairs window, and, as evening drew on, listen to her mother and father talk after they thought she had fallen asleep. In Welty’s later words,

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I don’t remember that any secrets were revealed to me, nor do I remember any avid curiosity on my part to learn something I wasn’t supposed to—perhaps I was too young to know what to listen for. But I was present in the room with the chief secret there was—the two of them, father and mother, sitting there as one. . . . I suppose I was exercising as early as then the turn of

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mind, the nature of temperament, of a privileged observer; and owing to the way I became so, it turned out that I became the loving kind. (862)

Welty’s self-analysis is astute, for the later observations embedded in her fiction rarely seem caustic or satirical; she regards most of her characters as she seems to have regarded (and been regarded by) her parents: with an innate curiosity, a charitable attentiveness, and a willingness to listen thoughtfully and see the best in others. Reflecting upon her childhood, Welty recalled going on casual Sunday drives, taking long car trips back to West Virginia and Ohio, attending plays and concerts, going to movies, and (of course) visiting the library (Ford and Kreyling 951–952). Welty’s father’s position as an insurance company executive meant that the family lived a comfortable middleclass existence; Welty’s mother did not have to work (although she did sell milk from a cow she owned), and Welty herself enjoyed the emotionally secure life of a well-loved oldest child. Her artistic talents manifested themselves in various ways and won her various forms of recognition, including the publication of a childhood drawing in a children’s magazine in 1920, the winning of a jingle contest in 1921, the publication of sketches and poems in the newspaper of Jackson’s Central High School, and the publication of one of her drawings by the Memphis Commercial Appeal (Ford and Kreyling 952). In fall 1925 she entered Mississippi State College for Women in Columbus, where she planned to focus on writing; while there, she published fiction, poetry, and artwork in campus publications and met and befriended people from diverse sections of the state and was particularly struck by their varied accents. Another opportunity to expand her geographical and cultural horizons presented itself when she transferred in 1927 to the University of Wisconsin in Madison (known for its fine liberal arts program), where she studied literature and art and became particularly interested in the modern writers, especially William Butler Yeats. She graduated from Wisconsin (where she had unfortunately felt somewhat isolated) in 1929, having by now displayed talent as a poet, artist, photographer, and writer of fiction. Unfortunately,

1929 was also the year in which the United States entered the Great Depression—the huge economic collapse that darkened life for many Americans for much of the next decade. Welty, on the advice of her ever-practical father, enrolled in 1930 in a one-year advertising program at the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University in New York City; if she could not make a living as a creative writer, she could at least help support herself by using her various talents in pragmatic ways. Not long after she returned to Jackson in 1931, her beloved father was stricken with leukemia, and, despite the desperate efforts of his wife to save him, he passed away quite quickly. For the next few years Welty earned an income by fulfilling various responsibilities at a local radio station and by reporting the Jackson social scene for a Memphis newspaper. It was in 1935, however, that she took a job that would have an especially important impact on her later career: She was hired by the Works Progress Administration (one of many federal programs designed to put people to work on useful projects during the depression) to travel Mississippi as a journalist and photographer. Welty’s experiences as a roving reporter gave her an even greater knowledge of her home territory than she had acquired already, and her duties as a photographer (concentrating mainly on regular folks and their daily lives) helped sharpen both her eye and her insight. By 1935 she was seeking a New York publisher for a collection her photos. Although she was unsuccessful in that endeavor, some of the prints were publicly displayed in New York in 1936 and 1937. By this time, too, Welty had begun submitting her short stories for publication, meeting with success when a well-regarded literary magazine accepted one of her most noted works, “Death of a Traveling Salesman.” From this point on, she increasingly became known as a writer of fiction, and although her stories were often rejected when first submitted, they usually found publishers eventually and thus helped establish Welty’s growing reputation. By 1938 one of Welty’s tales had been selected for inclusion in the important anthology (part of an annual series) titled The Best Short Stories 1938, and recognition and support had also begun to come Welty’s way thanks to the encouragement and

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support of such fellow authors as Katherine Anne Porter and Ford Madox Ford and such influential critical voices as ROBERT PENN WARREN and Cleanth Brooks. The latter pair edited a well-regarded journal known as the Southern Review, in which many of Welty’s stories first appeared. They also eventually became the authors of one of the most widely used textbooks in the country (Understanding Fiction); the inclusion of Welty’s work in that book would enhance her national profile even further. In the meantime, however, her career in the late 1930s and early 1940s moved from one highlight to another. One of her works was selected for inclusion in The Best Stories 1939; another was chosen for republication in the prestigious O. Henry Prize Stories of 1939. Yet another work appeared in The Best Stories 1940, and in the latter year Welty began a professional association (and close friendship) with the literary agent Diarmuid Russell, with whom she would work for many years and who would succeed in placing her work in many of the best (and best-paying) journals and magazines in the country. In 1941 her first collection of stories (A Curtain of Green) appeared, followed quickly in 1942 by the publication of a novella (The Robber Bridegroom) and, in 1943, by another collection (The Wide Net, and Other Stories). By 1943 Welty had won a fellowship to the Yaddo writers’ colony in New York (1941), had earned a secondplace finish in the O. Henry Memorial Awards for short fiction (1941), had won a highly sought-after Guggenheim Fellowship (1942), had won first prize in the O. Henry Memorial Awards (1942), and then had won first prize again in the same competition the very next year. Furthermore, and to no one’s surprise, one of her works was also included in The Best American Short Stories 1943. In little more than five years Welty moved from virtual obscurity to the front rank of fiction writers in the United States. Welty’s productivity continued unabated in the years immediately preceding and following the end of World War II in 1945. By 1946, for instance, she had produced another novel (Delta Wedding), and in 1949 she not only published a critical work titled Short Stories (based on a lecture given in 1947 at the University of Washington) but also issued a new collection of short fiction, titled The Golden Apples.

Also in 1949 she learned that her Guggenheim Fellowship had been extended, and during much of the late 1940s she traveled widely, visiting (and staying for lengthy periods) in such places as San Francisco, New York, Ireland, and England. In 1951, in fact, she lectured at Cambridge University and spent further time in Ireland (where she had become friends with the noted author Elizabeth Bowen). In 1952 she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1953 her Selected Stories (introduced by Katherine Anne Porter) was published as part of the highly respected Modern Library series; and in 1954 her third novel, The Ponder Heart, was not only published but chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection (thus ensuring very healthy sales). In 1955 Welty published The Bride of Innisfallen, and Other Stories, and in 1956 she attended a New York theatrical adaptation of The Ponder. Unfortunately, events in Welty’s personal life had now begun to take a darker turn: Her mother was increasingly frail (especially after eye surgery in 1955), and her brother Walter died in 1959. Welty herself had never married and never would, but she had an immense capacity for friendships that helped sustain her through the bleak times in her life. Few people could have sustained the pace of productivity that Welty had set in the 1940s and 1950s, and Welty did not. Her work as a writer of short stories declined significantly in quantity (if not in quality) in the 1960s, but throughout the 1960s she gave lectures, wrote about fiction, and worked on various other writing projects. In 1970 she issued a novel titled Losing Battles that sold many copies, and in 1972 she published another novel (The Optimist’s Daughter), which earned her the Pulitzer Prize (one of the few awards she had not previously won). The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews appeared in 1978, and in the following year Welty won the National Medal for Literature. In 1980 a large volume of her Collected Stories was published and won various significant awards, and in that same year Welty was presented with the presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House. Her 1983 autobiographical lectures at Harvard University were quickly published as the best-selling book One Writer’s Beginnings, which soon won a number

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of important awards of its own. A collection titled Photographs appeared in 1989, A Writer’s Eye: Collected Book Reviews was issued in 1994, and in 1998 Welty received the major honor of seeing most of her writings published in two thick volumes as part of the prestigious Library of America series. By the time she died of pneumonia on July 23, 2001, she had established a reputation not only as one of her country’s finest writers but also as a much-beloved human being, known for her personal kindness, generosity, and gentle spirit. The intellectual and moral values inculcated long ago by her loving parents had borne splendid fruit.

“Petrified Man” (1939) As she works on the hair of the newly pregnant Mrs. Fletcher in a rundown beauty parlor in a small southern town, Leota describes her friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Pike, who recently have moved from New Orleans and are renting rooms from Leota and her husband. Amid much gossip and local social commentary, Leota describes a visit she and Mrs. Pike recently made to a traveling freak show, where they saw, among many other curiosities, a petrified man who could move his head only a quarter of an inch. Later Leota describes how Mrs. Pike, while reading a cheap crime magazine owned by Leota, spotted a picture of Mr. Petrie, an escaped rapist from California, who Mrs. Pike immediately realized was not only an old neighbor from New Orleans but also none other than the petrified man in the freak show. Mrs. Pike was thus able to turn him in and claim a $500 reward, much to Leota’s frustration, since the magazine belonged to her. Like many of Welty’s stories, this one is full of vivid characterizations of small-time, small-town southerners; its tone is comic, and much of its humor depends on dialect, dialogue, and odd-yetsomehow-oddly-familiar behavior. Nothing much “happens” in the tale, and there are no profound moral issues at stake (as there often are, for instance, in the comic works of FLANNERY O’CONNOR , another southern woman writer whose works are almost always set, like Welty’s, within her own

region). Welty’s main interest is in peculiarities of character—peculiarities of thought, speech, and conduct that are rendered in a tone that is, for the most part, gently amusing, although it sometimes contains a sardonic or satirical edge. In her superb overview of the history of, influences on, and critical responses to this tale, Diana R. Pingatore notes the ironic fact that when the editors of the Southern Review asked to have a second look at the text (which they had already once rejected), Welty, frustrated that the work had already been turned down by that journal and a number of others, had already destroyed the work. The tale as it now exists, then, was reconstructed from her memory; she was able to perform this feat rather easily (she claimed), because the story depended so much on reported speech. She was thus able to recall and rewrite it because she had memorized it almost as if it were a tape recording (Pingatore 29–30). In the course of characterizing so many others, Leota inevitably characterizes herself—a standard technique in much of Welty’s fiction, especially in such works as “Why I Live at the P.O.” The success or failure of a tale such as “Petrified Man” depends on Welty’s ability to capture convincingly the speech of the people she depicts, and there is no doubt that she achieves such success in the present story. In this as in a number of her other works, she reveals a flair for dramatization; her characters use the kinds of words, phrases, intonations, and bits of slang and dialect that make them seem real. This work, like so many of Welty’s writings, is partly an example of the “local color” tradition in American fiction: It takes us into the typical life of a locale that may seem ordinary in some respects but also seems intriguingly offthe-beaten-path in others. There is a sense in which we, as readers of “Petrified Man,” make a visit to a kind of freak show in much the same way as the characters in the story do. We enjoy observing (and listening to) Welty’s characters perform their peculiar antics and speak their exotic English, yet our attitude toward them is less one of condescending superiority than of amused identification. Although in some respects they seem caricatures presented mainly to make us laugh, in other respects they are recognizably human, with all the foibles and stubbornness

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that can make people both endearing and sometimes a bit exasperating. Some readers of “Petrified Man” have found the tone of the work more satiric than comical. To these readers, the three main women characters (Leota, Mrs. Fletcher, and Mrs. Pike) are less amusing than vulgar, and their attitudes toward (and treatment of) the male characters have sometimes been seen as emasculating and even as symbolically castrating. According to this reading of the tale, Welty is mocking the mental and spiritual shallowness of the three women, who in turn represent the mental and spiritual shallowness of a certain kind of small town life and of a certain kind of aggressive female psychology (Pingatore 33–35). From this perspective, the women embody and epitomize the most superficial aspects of modern life, while the various tensions between males and females in the tale reflect the age-old battle of the sexes—a battle in which Welty seems less sympathetic to the women than one might have anticipated. Surprisingly, some early commentators even expressed a certain degree of admiration for the alleged rapist, Mr. Petrie, whom they saw as a male who had defied domination by women. Recent analysts, though, have been far less inclined to endorse this view (Pingatore 36). For most readers, however, the enduring interest of the tale is probably less the result of any themes it explores than the consequence of the vivid details of Welty’s phrasing and characterizations. Leota, in particular, is hard to forget once we have met her—a fact that makes it completely believable that Welty could reconstruct the whole tale simply by remembering Leota’s voice.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Welty’s later story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” How are the works similar and/or different in setting, tone, technique, perspective, and final impact? What is the purpose of each work, and how do those purposes differ from or resemble one another? 2. Discuss the use of satire, the techniques of characterization, and the depiction of relations between the sexes in this work and in Flannery O’Connor’s

tale “Good Country People.” Does one (in your opinion) have more philosophical or moral depth than the other? If this is the case, does such a difference make one work more significant than the other? How and why is comedy used in each work? Does one work appeal to you more than the other? If so, explain why. 3. How does the depiction of small town life in this work resemble or differ from the depiction of such life in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town? How are the works similar or distinct in tone, method, characterization, and underlying purpose? Could Wilder’s play have been set successfully in the South? Could Welty’s story have been set successfully in a small New England town? What do your answers to these questions imply about the use of local color in literature?

“Why I Live at the P.O.” (1941) Sister, the speaker of this tale set in a tiny southern town, mentions the pleasant relations she once enjoyed with the rest of her family (including Mama; her grandfather, Papa-Daddy; and Uncle Rondo) before her younger sister, Stella-Rondo, returned from a brief stay in Illinois, where she had been married to a man named Mr. Whitaker (who had once shown an interest in Sister herself) and where she also acquired a young daughter named Shirley-T., whom Stella-Rondo insisted she had adopted but who Sister loudly claimed was Stella-Rondo’s own child. One by one (at least according to Sister), Stella-Rondo succeeded in turning each of the other family members against Sister: She told Papa-Daddy that Sister disliked the long beard in which he took such pride, she told Uncle Rondo that Sister had mocked the way he was dressed, and she even stirred up trouble between Sister and Mama. When Uncle Rondo retaliated against the alleged insults by setting off fi recrackers in Sister’s room, Sister decided that she had had enough: She gathered up her belongings and moved into the small post office where she worked, and it is there that she tells her tale and nurses her grievances.

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This tale is one of Welty’s most famous, partly because it is a bravura exercise in the art of storytelling, both by Sister and by Welty herself. By creating such a memorable character and putting the whole narrative entirely in her mouth, Welty breathes vitality into her text. Sister is driven by a lifetime of sibling rivalry, a raft load of recent frustrations, and a crushing burden of feeling conspired against and unappreciated. Welty expertly captures the subtle inflections of Sister’s anger and exasperation, and it is not difficult to imagine a real human voice speaking to a presumably sympathetic listener. Sister can recall every precise detail of her recent humiliations, and in the process of remembering them she re-creates all the detailed texture of a complicated family life. Admittedly, this family is perhaps more full of oddballs and kooks than most, and sometimes Welty seems to be treating them as eccentric caricatures in a situation comedy rather than as fully credible human beings. Nevertheless, the story achieves some measure of complexity thanks to the comic distance we achieve from Sister’s belligerent perspective. Although Sister sometimes pauses to address her listener directly (for example, “Do you remember who it was really said that?” [64]), it is hard to take her account entirely at face value. In any case, it does not much matter who is right and who is wrong, who is aggrieved and who does the aggrieving; the chief interest of the tale results from Welty’s lovingly detailed descriptions of the realistic minutiae of life and the real rhythms of southern speech. As Ruth M. Vande Kieft memorably states it: Sister’s monologue is comic not only because of the apparent illogic of her logic, but because of her manner of speaking. One can see the fierce indignant gleam in her eye as the stream of natural Southern idiom flows out of her: at once elliptical and baroque, full of irrelevancies, redolent of a way of life, a set of expressions, of prejudices, interests, problems, and human reactions that swiftly convey to the reader a comic and satiric portrait of this Mississippi family. (55)

Critical response to the story has often centered around the question of whether Sister may be crazy

(or at least clinically paranoid). Welty herself disputed this interpretation, arguing that Sister was merely isolated and therefore (partly as a result) in love with drama, exaggeration, and self-centered storytelling (Pingatore 73). The story clearly shows that individuals adopt (and adapt) their personal identities in response to family dynamics, and although the work is comic in many respects, it also offers a fairly unsentimental view of family relations (as when Sister reports, “‘I told you if you ever mentioned Annie Flo’s name I’d slap your face,’ says Mama, and slaps my face” [62]). It seems both appropriate and ironic that the story takes place on the Fourth of July—appropriate since the events of the day lead Sister to declare her own independence, but ironic because Independence Day is ostensibly an occasion to celebrate a joyous new union, the creation of a new national family. The comic tone of Welty’s tale suggests that this family will eventually heal its wounds, but in the meantime they (and we) have at least learned the limits of Sister’s patience. The story is a particularly memorable contribution to the long southern traditional of oral storytelling, conveying in a few thousand words a memorable sense of a particular time and place and a vivid style of speech.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How is Welty’s depiction of complex family relations in this story similar to and especially different from Theodore Dreiser’s depiction of such relations in “Old Rogaum and His Theresa”? Discuss the works in terms of such matters as tone, technique, style, and narrative point of view. How is geographical setting used effectively in both works? 2. William Faulkner’s tale titled “Barn Burning” also deals with a central character in conflict with many other characters in the story. He also feels, as Sister does in Welty’s tale, increasingly isolated, and he takes steps to isolate himself even further. Compare and contrast the two works in terms of their tones, settings, characterization, and fi nal outcomes. 3. Like Welty’s story, JOHN UPDIKE’s “A&P” is told from the perspective (and in the voice) of the central character. How do both authors use diction,

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slang, dialogue, and tone to characterize their protagonists? How are the plots of the stories similar, especially in their movements toward the increasing isolation of Sister and Sammy? How and why does each author use comedy effectively?

“A Worn Path” (1941) On a cold December day, old Phoenix Jackson—a black woman who lives out in the Mississippi countryside with her injured young grandson—makes the long, arduous trek into town, walking through woods, through fields, and across a stream and encountering (and speaking to) many creatures (including plants, birds, other animals, and even a scarecrow) along the way. When she meets a friendly if somewhat patronizing young white man who is out hunting with his dog (and who helps her up when he finds her fallen), she spies the chance to grab a nickel he has dropped; tucking it safely into her pocket, she moves on. When she eventually arrives in town, she heads for a doctor’s office, where a nurse not only gives her medicine for her grandson but also gives her another nickel—a nickel Phoenix plans to use to help purchase a little paper windmill for the boy. Although most readers have been charmed and moved by Welty’s depiction of elderly Phoenix Jackson, with her spirit of persistence and stoic endurance, other readers have found the character an example of the ways African Americans are often stereotyped in fiction in general and in Welty’s fiction in particular. Rather than being treated as a complex human being (these later readers argue), Phoenix is depicted as a quaint, eccentric, good-natured, nonthreatening old woman (a kind of “mammy” or “Aunt Jemima” figure) whom the white characters can treat with a sort of condescending charity that sometimes verges (as in the case of the hunter) on hints of intimidation. Reading Welty’s story, it is certainly easy to forget the darker aspects of relations between the races in Mississippi in the 1940s, but perhaps part of the purpose of the tale is to demonstrate the true fellow feeling that can ideally exist when people see each other as parts of an extended family rather than as members of distinct racial or economic subgroups. A number of the whites in the story respond to Phoe-

nix as they might to their own grandparents, and the fact that the story is set at Christmastime is surely no accident: In some respects the tale is a celebration of the kind of generosity and love (especially by Phoenix toward her grandson) that we associate with that season of the year. On the other hand, it is also possible to read the tale as a subtle indictment of the patronizing racism of some of the whites—as understated satire of their failure, both in attitudes and in actions, to live up to the true spirit of both Christmas and Christianity. Whatever their attitudes toward the whites in the tale, most readers have found the story and its central figure warm and appealing; in her good humor, perseverance, and selfless devotion to another, Phoenix seems to embody some of the best aspects of the human spirit. She, more than anyone else in the story, embodies the true spirit of charity and kindness, and although it would have been easy to make her entirely a figure of sentimental pity, Welty complicates our response by showing that Phoenix can be tough, sly, hard-nosed, and even skeptical (as in her complex response to the hunter or her later dealings with the nurse). Because of her first name (which suggests the legendary bird that rises, reborn, from the ashes of destruction—and that, for that reason, has often been associated with Christ), because of her quaint habit of speaking to flora and fauna, and because of her absent-mindedness as well as her single-minded imperturbability, Phoenix attains an almost mythic dimension. She is a small old woman, but somehow she is also larger than life. Her journey is the latest in a long line of quest narratives that run from the beginning of recorded time; the “worn path” of the title is not only the literal path Phoenix walks but also, metaphorically, her own life and the lives of all people throughout the ages who have walked long and worked hard in the struggle to survive and (more important) to sustain the next generation. However much Welty’s story may imply a critique of the specific social relations of her day, her tale is also a deeply affecting affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit. Phoenix Jackson is an archetype of the loving “grand mother,” who struggles, as she nears the end of her own life, to nurture the life of a child she loves.

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For Discussion or Writing 1. Flannery O’Connor’s story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” also deals with relations between whites and blacks in the South and with a white woman’s gift of money to a poorer black. How do the stories resemble and/or differ from each other in tone, characterization, setting, and purpose? How are religious connotations used in both stories? 2. Compare and contrast Welty’s depiction of an elderly person on a journey with the similar depiction offered in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Mr. Flood’s Party.” What are the purposes of the two journeys? How are Phoenix and Mr. Flood similar and/or different? How is comedy used in both texts? Which of the two characters is more isolated, and how do the different levels of isolation contribute to the tones of the two works? 3. Which factor—race, class, gender, or age—is most important in this story? How do they intersect and interact? What difference (if any) would it make if the central character were an old white woman, or an old black man, or a poor young white girl? How (if at all) does Welty prevent the story from becoming sentimental? How does she make the story relevant to readers outside rural Mississippi? 4. Welty herself wrote an essay about this story (“Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?”). First, without having read the essay, give your own response to the question its title asks; be sure to provide evidence to support your argument. Then, after having read the essay, compare Welty’s answer and reasons for your own, and, in general, discuss the usefulness and effectiveness of Welty’s own comments about her story.

“The Wide Net” (1942) When William Wallace Jamieson’s new wife, Hazel, becomes pregnant, she begins to ignore him and focus on her own condition; in response, he decides to spend a night out with his male friends, drinking, singing, and otherwise enjoying themselves. When he returns home, however, he finds an empty house and a note from Hazel in which she announces her

intention to drown herself in the local river—a threat that causes her husband to round up practically all the male neighbors to help him drag the river for her body. After a long and sometimes even festive communal effort to find and recover Hazel’s corpse, the young husband returns home, only to discover Hazel waiting for him in a spirit of reconciliation but also of subtle dominance. Some readers of this story, noting that William Wallace is accompanied on his journey/quest by a best friend named Virgil, have compared the tale both to the epic poem The Aeneid (by the Roman poet Virgil) and—with more obvious relevance—to Dante’s epic The Divine Comedy (Pingatore 196). In the latter poem (which consists, as does Welty’s story, of three major sections), the speaker first finds himself at a loss; then, assisted by a companion named Virgil, he engages in a long and arduous journey; finally, he attains a vision of happiness that involves a beautiful young woman. Although it would be foolish to push these parallels too far, certain basic similarities between “The Wide Net” and The Divine Comedy do seem to exist, and Welty’s subtle use of literary echoes and allusions is indeed typical of her work in general. Welty’s own reading was both wide and deep, but she wears her learning lightly, keeping her focus squarely (and, for the most part, convincingly) on her immediate Mississippi setting even when she may be playing variations on Dante at some deeper level of design. The “wide net” of Welty’s title refers to the literal net used to drag the river, but it also alludes, more broadly, to the wide range of people who join William Wallace in his quest. In few other of her most famous stories does Welty offer such a comprehensive picture of a broad local community: Her own “wide net” takes in a diverse range of character types, from the wise old man named Doc (who owns the net and who comments sagely, if somewhat pompously, on the communal quest), to the “gator-rass’lin’” Malone clan, to two young black boys named Robbie Bell and Sam (to mention just a few). Here, as in so many of her other works, Welty uses all the resources of the local color tradition (including eccentric characters, odd customs, peculiar dialect, unusual habits of thought and behavior, and an exotic locale) to cre-

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ate a vision of an unfamiliar but highly textured way of life. However, at the same time as she presents a world that will inevitably seem distant from the lives of most readers, Welty also deals with some of the most common of all human experiences, such as the complicated relations between husbands and wives, the changes wrought in a marriage by the advent of pregnancy, the importance of connections between the individual self and the larger community, and the age-old battle of the sexes. That battle ends (in this story, at least) in an intriguing draw, with perhaps the woman positioned slightly on top. On the one hand, William Wallace does ultimately give Hazel (in a scene that will make feminists cringe) a mild spanking (preceded by what the narrator calls “a little tap and slap” [226]). On the other hand, the story ends with Hazel’s asserting (without William’s objection) her right to misbehave in the future, and the very last words of the tale describe her leading him “into the house, smiling as if she were smiling down on him” (227). If the ending of the story is comic, it is comic in a way that seems to affirm a certain degree of feminine power. As in most comedies, the story seems to celebrate both the spirit of community and the union of the sexes; it shows humans achieving a kind of balance not only with a sometimes-threatening nature but also with the self.

For Discussion or Writing 1. In “The Wide Net,” the main character gathers an ever-growing group of friends and community members who come to his assistance. How does this pattern reverse the basic narrative pattern underlying Welty’s story “Why I Live at the P.O.”? How does the gender of the main characters in each story affect their experiences? How does Welty complicate the tone of each work, darkening the obviously comic story and lightening the story that seems potentially tragic? 2. Compare and contrast “The Wide Net” with Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire.” In particular, discuss such matters as setting, isolation versus community, the wisdom of elderly people, and the differences of final tone. How and why is one story comic and the other tragic? How is each story typical of the works of the author who wrote it?

3. Is “The Wide Net” a credible, plausible work of fiction? Are there any respects in which it seems contrived or unconvincing? Do people actually behave as Welty’s characters do? How does Welty strive to make her characters and their actions convincing? How and why does she succeed? Are there any respects in which she fails? Is the story meant to be convincingly realistic, or is it meant to be primarily symbolic? Justify your responses by pointing to specific textual evidence.

“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” (1963) An interior monologue given from the perspective of the imagined assassin of African-American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, this four-page story was written in a single night after Evers’s shooting. “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” recounts a famous tragedy that increased Americans’ awareness of the Civil Rights movement, brought to light the violent response to this movement, and presented the American public and the world with one of the many horrific moments in the long history of African-American suffering. Although Welty does not name the man killed, he is clearly Medgar Evers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader who led a boycott campaign against white merchants and helped desegregate the University of Mississippi. After investigating the murder of Emmett Till and serving as one of the leaders of the NAACP, Evers was the target of many threats in the weeks prior to his murder, when he was shot in the back of the head in his driveway just after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. While this story is well known and recognized for its artful reimaging of the event, Welty does not provide an intervening narrator—someone who might interpret the murderer’s actions and question his perspective. In choosing to render the story from the perspective of a racist, bigoted killer who often uses the racial epithet nigger, and who chooses to murder and does so without remorse, Welty leaves the reader in a complicated situation, one where we must supply the moral corrective ourselves. Of course, as with

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many cases in literature where authors do not supply such a perspective and deliberate moral cues, the story is open to interpretation, fi lled with ambiguity. While ambiguity and paradox may be at the heart of literature, these very characteristics place a great deal of responsibility on the reader and often engender surface-level criticisms that overlook the way the story transcends historical reporting and reflects the nature of man’s inhumanity to man. Thus, in this case, the story was contested early on for its racist language and bigoted perspective. In responding to such claims about ethical responsibility not only in her works but also in other southern American writers’ works, Welty outlined in 1965 her conception of fiction and what fiction writers seek to accomplish: The ordinary novelist does not argue; he hopes to show, to disclose. His persuasions are all toward allowing his reader to see and hear something for himself. He knows another bad thing about arguments: they carry the menace of neatness into fiction. Indeed, what we as the crusadernovelist are scared of most is confusion. Great fiction, we very much fear, abounds in what makes for confusion; it generates it, being on a scale which copies life, which it confronts. It is very seldom neat, is given to sprawling and escaping from bounds, is capable of contradicting itself, and is not impervious to humor. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. (New Yorker)

Thus, indirectly, Welty justifies the aesthetic, formalistic, and narrative strategies she employs in “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” The story renders a time of civic unrest in America by presenting it through the imagined interior of a cold-blooded killer. While the story may refrain from making a commentary, it is a testimony both to the power of literature and to the many social concerns with which literature trades. As a work that captures its turbulent time, it brings to life a worrisome chapter in our nation’s narrative. As a work of literature that forces us to enter a racist mind, inhabit its world, and ultimately make sense of it, “Where Is the Voice

Coming From?” places the awesome responsibility of understanding history and drawing ethical conclusions about its meaning on us.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Given the story’s historical significance as a record of a turbulent time in America’s past, consider its title. Write a well-developed essay on the significance of the story’s title. 2. Evaluate Welty’s creation of the persona in this story, itself an interior monologue. Is the language in this monologue believable, realistic? After answering that question, write an essay that analyzes the specific word choices and colloquial expressions that help create this perspective. Evaluate whether Welty’s style here relies on stereotyping or whether the style achieved has captured the usual sorts of complexities and contradictions we associate with being human.

One Writer’s Beginnings (1984) In this late book of autobiographical reflections (which is divided into three parts, titled, respectively, “Listening,” “Learning to See,” and “Finding a Voice”), Welty recalls the lives of her parents, their influence on her own development, her growth as a writer, and her artistic ideals, aspirations, and practices. First delivered as a series of lectures at Harvard University in April 1983, this book includes a number of photographs of Welty’s ancestors and family, of her childhood neighborhood and home, of places she and her family visited, and of Welty herself at various stages of her life. Even more important than the actual photographs, however, are the verbal pictures Welty sketches of her supportive and loving parents, of her mother’s (and her own) obsession with books, of her growing awareness of her physical surroundings and of other people, and of her early efforts in literature and photography. The overall picture that emerges is of a sensitive and generous young woman whose inquisitiveness and self-respect were nurtured by both parents in different ways—a woman whose gentle detachment, combined with a genuine and humane

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interest in others, allowed her to see clearly and capture sharply (both on film and in fiction) the subtle shadings of the people and places she observed. Welty begins by describing her practical-minded, inventive, but kind-natured father, who always looked to the future and tried to be prepared for whatever it might hold. Her mother was in love with literature (she once rescued a prize set of Dickens from a burning house), and young Welty’s home was filled with books and with a love of reading and learning. At one point Welty in fact remarks, “I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me—and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting—into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet” (847). Some of her most vivid memories involve specific books as well as the general process of reading, and it is clear that her early enthusiasm for words and for all manner of writing helped shaped the kind of author she later became. Yet, books were not the only influence she embraced; she also loved listening to stories, whether told by her parents or related by neighbors. One woman, in particular, would accompany the Welty family on Sunday drives, and Welty recalls that “my mother sat in the back with her friend, and I’m told that as a small child I would ask to sit in the middle, and say as we started off, ‘Now talk’” (852). From the habit of a lifetime of listening closely—a habit that began when she was a youngster—Welty developed into a story writer whose works are full of the convincing sounds of human voices. She read widely, but she also kept her ears open, and both practices had a major influence on her later fiction. As she notes in one important passage: My instinct—the dramatic instinct—was to lead me, eventually, on the right track for a storyteller: the scene was full of hints, pointers, suggestions, and promises of things to fi nd out and know about human beings. I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken—and to know a truth, I also had to recognize a lie. (854)

Just as important as the influence of books and voices on Welty’s fiction, however, was the impact

of an increasingly observant and practiced eye. Her skills at precise observation were honed by her experiences as a traveling journalist/photographer in the 1930s for the Mississippi office of the national Works Progress Administration (WPA), which had been formed to help fight the depression by putting people to work on useful projects. “Traveling over the whole of Mississippi, writing news stories for county papers, taking pictures,” Welty writes, “I saw my home state at close hand, really for the first time” (928). Her work as a photographer for the WPA helped teach her to observe closely and capture essences in precise moments of time—talents obviously relevant to her growing interest in the writing of fiction. One of her comments about photography, for instance, seems obviously relevant to her writing as well: A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had. Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture; and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it. These were things a story writer needed to know. (928)

One Writer’s Beginnings embodies the very values it describes: It is full of vivid pictures and of memorable voices, and it is typical of Welty’s modesty that so much of the book is given over, in generous tribute, to others, including teachers and friends, relatives and acquaintances, and especially her beloved parents. All these persons, but especially her parents, helped shape the woman and writer she became. It seems fitting that her last major book, written late in life, should take her (and her readers) back to her childhood and youth, where everything began.

For Discussion or Writing 1. How is Welty’s autobiography similar to and/or different from Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, particularly in terms of setting(s), family circumstances, career aspirations, obstacles confronted, and achievements obtained? How do matters of race, class, and gender impinge upon

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both narratives? What values do Washington and Welty seem to have shared despite their obvious differences? 2. Compare and contrast One Writer’s Beginnings with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. How are the two works similar and/or different in tone, techniques, style, and narrative methods? What social, artistic, and ethical values seem to be implied by each work? Which protagonist (Stein or Welty) appeals to you more? Explain your reaction. 3. How does Welty’s account of her life in One Writer’s Beginnings differ from or seem comparable to the accounts offered by the Native American writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) in such works as “Impressions of an Indian Girlhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians”? Discuss the roles of such factors as family backgrounds, parental influences, and educational experiences in these writings by Welty and Bonnin.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WELTY AND HER WORK 1. Examine the presentation of black characters in at least three different works by Welty. In what ways do they conform to and/or depart from common stereotypes? Does any particular view of blacks (especially any particular political view) seem to be implied by Welty’s presentation of them? Do Welty’s presentations of blacks seem to change as her career evolves? Is there any difference, for instance, in the ways she depicts African Americans in stories from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s? 2. Welty’s stories are often comic, but can you identify (and discuss) any darker elements in her works and explain how they complicate and contribute to the effectiveness of her writings? Are there any “serious” implications to Welty’s comedy? Are comic writings, in general, less “profound” or “significant” than tragic works? Of

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the two kinds of writing, which do you prefer, and why? Although Welty’s writings are almost always set in the South, how does she deal with “universal” themes—that is, with issues of broad concern to humans everywhere and at all times? Discuss three examples of works in which Welty seems to transcend “local color” to achieve a wider vision. How, if at all, does her focus on local details help lend credibility and resonance to her works and make them appealing to readers of many different backgrounds? Welty published several novels, including The Robber Bridegroom (1942), Delta Wedding (1946), The Ponder Heart (1954), Losing Battles (1970), and The Optimist’s Daughter (1972). How does one of her novels compare—in theme, characterization, tone, and effectiveness—with her best short fiction, and especially with short fiction written around the same time as the novel? Why is Welty usually thought of primarily as a writer of short stories rather than as a novelist? What are the special challenges of writing in each genre? Is it difficult for an author to write equally well in both genres? If so, why? Choose one of the several collections of Welty’s stories, such as A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net, and Other Stories (1943), The Bride of Innisfallen, and Other Stories (1955), and especially The Golden Apples (1949). Do these collections have any unity, or are they simply aggregations of disparate works? Do they “hang together” in terms of themes, style, subjects, tones, and so on? Discuss several adjacent stories in one of these volumes. Do the stories become more comprehensible or interesting when read as parts of sequences? Examine some of Welty’s own nonfiction and/ or critical writings—such as Short Stories (1949), Place in Fiction (1957), Three Papers on Fiction (1962), A Sweet Devouring (1969), The Eye of the Story (1978), or A Writer’s Eye (1994)—and discuss the relevance of Welty’s critical ideas to her own fiction. Do any of her stories seem to “illustrate” any of her critical ideas? Is Welty an

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insightful commentator on her own fiction? In her reviews, by what criteria does she seem to evaluate the fiction of others? Are these criteria germane to her own works? Choose one of Welty’s works and try to place it in as full a historical context as possible. What was happening politically, socially, and economically at the time the work was written and first published? What was happening in Welty’s own life at the time? What was happening in “pop” culture and “high” culture? How and why can Welty’s work be related to all these various developments? Welty was an accomplished photographer as well as an author of fiction. Examine one or more of her published collections of photographs—such as One Time, One Place (1971; rev. ed. 1996) or Photographs (1989)—and discuss the relevance of her pictures to her fiction. For instance, choose a particular story and relate it (in style, techniques, and subject matter) to photos taken in the years just preceding the composition of the story. What (if anything) do Welty’s photographs imply about her attitudes toward the people she presents in her pictures and in her writings? Choose one particular section from one particular work by Welty and discuss (1) how that section is typical of Welty’s writing in general; (2) how that passage fits into, and contributes to, the larger work of which it is a part; and (3) how that section is effective as a piece of writing, especially in terms of such matters as diction, imagery, dialect, and rhythm. Read the works in Welty’s 1955 collection The Bride of Innisfallen, and Other Stories, and then compare and contrast the stories set in Europe with the ones set in the South. How do the settings affect the stories in terms of theme, characterization, and language, and how do they contribute to the overall effectiveness of the tales? Is Welty more successful in depicting one kind of setting than another? Can you make any other generalizations about the “southern” stories and the ones set in Europe?

WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Eudora Welty: Updated Edition. New York: Chelsea House, 2007. Champion, Laurie, ed. The Critical Response to Eudora Welty’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. “Eudora Welty Newsletter.” Georgia State University. Available online. URL: http://www2.gsu. edu/~wwwewn/index.htm. Accessed March 11, 2007. Ford, Richard, and Michael Kreyling. “Chronology.” In Stories, Essays and Memoir, by Eudora Welty, 951–999. New York: Library of America, 1998. Gretlund, Jan Nordby. Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Johnston, Carol Ann. Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1997. “Mississippi Writer’s Page: Eudora Welty (1909–2001).” The Internet Guide to Mississippi Writers. Available online. URL: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/ english/ms-writers/dir/welty_eudora/. Accessed March 11, 2007. Pingatore, Diana R. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Eudora Welty: Thirteen Essays. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1983. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Eudora Welty.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/ chap10/welty.html. Accessed March 11, 2007. Schmidt, Peter. The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991. Vande Kieft, Ruth M. Eudora Welty: Revised Edition. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Welty, Eudora. Stories, Essays, and Memoir. Edited by Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling. New York: Library of America, 1998. ———. “Must the Novelist Crusade” New Yorker, October 1965, 104–108.

Robert C. Evans

Richard Wilbur (1921–

)

One of the jobs of poetry is to make the unbearable bearable, not by falsehood but by clear, precise confrontation. Even the most cheerful poet has to cope with pain as part of the human lot; what he shouldn’t do is to complain, and dwell on his personal mischance. (Richard Wilbur, qtd. in Butts, ed., Conversations 194)

A

lthough Richard Wilbur is widely considered one of the most important American poets of the second half of the 20th century, and although that status has been confi rmed through numerous awards, many honorary degrees, frequent laudatory reviews, and even his appointment as poet laureate of the United States, Wilbur has at the same time often been seen as a poet of limited range, forms, subjects, tones, and style. No writer, of course, can be wholly expansive and truly comprehensive, and Wilbur in fact deserves great respect for bucking many of the trends and fads of recent poetry and instead hewing closely to an authentically personal sense of his specific poetic vocation. In the process he has produced some of the most fi nely crafted and carefully phrased lyric verse of our era. Richard Purdy Wilbur was born on March 1, 1921, in New York, New York, to Lawrence Lazear Wilbur, a painter who specialized in portraits, and Helen Ruth Purdy Wilbur, whose father was a journalist and editor. In 1923 young Wilbur and his family moved to a stone house, for which they paid a modest rent, which was located on the estate of a wealthy English businessman and expatriate named J. D. Armitage. Armitage had immigrated to America because he felt that businessmen were not properly appreciated in England, and in New Jersey he established a kind of English country manor, with a large house overlooking more than 400 acres of farmland, including “orchards, pastures, nurseries, walled gar-

dens and lanes [as well as a] barn and pen and dairy, massively constructed in stone and roofed with tile” (Wilbur, qtd. in Butts 116). In these idyllic surroundings Wilbur grew up, playing mostly with his brother and imbibing the love of natural beauty that distinguishes much of his verse. Life on the estate also helped to inculcate the kind of Anglophilia that seems to characterize much of Wilbur’s temperament and many of his intellectual attitudes. After attending a series of local schools—including Essex Falls Public School, Grover Cleveland Junior High School, and Montclair High School— Wilbur arrived at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1938. While at Amherst he was active on the school paper, both as writer and editor, and he became extremely interested in the study of literature, particularly by the kind of “close reading” that was just then coming into vogue, and his interest was so great that although he had fl irted with the ideas of becoming a painter or cartoonist, he increasingly assumed that he would become a professor of literature. During summer breaks from Amherst, Wilbur twice hitched rides on railcars and in automobiles and thus toured large sections of the United States, and he also fell in love with Mary Charlotte Hayes Ward, a student at nearby Smith College, whom he married on June 20, 1942, after graduation from Amherst. By this time, of course, the United States had been plunged into World War II because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the preceding

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December. Wilbur trained for service as a cryptographer, but when an investigation revealed that his political sympathies were left-wing, he was rejected as a security risk. Reassigned to regular service and sent to fight in Europe, he nevertheless became a cryptographer with his new unit when the man who had previously held that job lost his mind. While serving in Europe on some of the most important fronts of the war, Wilbur seriously began to write poetry during the long stretches of anxious boredom that characterizes so much of life in combat. Poetry, he has often said, helped him impose a sense of order on the chaos of the circumstances that then surrounded him. Having survived the war, Wilbur was one of many soldiers who benefited from the GI Bill, which helped returning servicemen attend college with government assistance. Wilbur enrolled in graduate school at Harvard University, where he intended to study English in preparation for a career in college teaching. However, a friend with connections in publishing who happened to read some of the poems Wilbur had been writing quickly pronounced Wilbur a genuine poet and helped him secure a contract for his first book. This collection (which appeared in 1947, the same year Wilbur received his Harvard M.A.) was titled The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems; it was widely reviewed and highly praised. In addition, more good fortune came Wilbur’s way when he was appointed, in 1947, as a junior fellow at Harvard—an appointment that helped him afford to live in France the following year, the same year in which he received the prestigious Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry magazine. As both an academic and a poet, then, his career was off to an extremely auspicious start. Wilbur’s second book—Ceremony and Other Poems—appeared in 1950, the same year in which he was also awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize by Poetry magazine and began a five-year teaching stint at Harvard. By 1952 his reputation was already so significant that he was awarded an honorary M.A. by Amherst, his alma mater, as well as a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, which was designed to give him the time and resources to try his hand at writ-

ing verse drama. Although Wilbur never felt that he was successful in crafting a strong verse play of his own, his efforts to educate himself in this task led him to engage in the fi rst of many verse translations of the works of the French playwright Molière, thus launching another and highly successful phase of his career. His translation of Molière’s The Misanthrope was published in 1955 to great acclaim, and his later translations of Molière and others have led him to be considered one of the most accomplished literary translators of our age. By 1955 he had also been awarded the Prix de Rome Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a prize that gave him an opportunity to live and write in Rome. Other accomplishments of 1955 included publication of A Bestiary, a book of poems and prose pieces about animals, and the coediting and publication of a significant anthology of recent English and American verse. Also in 1955 Wilbur began a two-year tenure as a professor of English at Wellesley College, followed in 1956 by the publication of his third book of poetry, Things of This World, and in 1957 by his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In that same year he received both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Prize, and a collection of verse titled Poems 1943–1956 was published in England. In 1957 also, his contributions as lyricist to the Broadway musical Candide (with a score by Leonard Bernstein) were published, and he was appointed professor of English at Wesleyan University, a position he held for 20 years. Thus, in little more than a decade since the end of World War II, Wilbur had risen to the top rank of creative writers in America, distinguishing himself not only as a writer of verse but as a translator and musical lyricist and even as a notable scholar of Edgar Allan Poe, a literary precursor with whom he engaged in an affectionate and long-running debate. He has often said that as a poet he has tried to defi ne himself in opposition to Poe, attempting to emphasize the concrete and particular, in contrast to Poe’s tendency toward rarefied abstractions. Nevertheless his attitude toward Poe, as indeed toward most other

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writers (even those whose styles of writing are significantly different from his own), has usually been respectful and genially good-humored. The 1960s was another decade of success for Wilbur. During 1960–61 he held a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and in the latter year he not only was elected chancellor of the American Academy of Poets but also represented the United States on a goodwill tour of the Soviet Union. In that same year, too, his latest collection of verse was issued—a volume titled Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems. This text, in 1962, won the Melville Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America, and in 1963 Wilbur himself received his second Guggenheim Fellowship. The year 1963 also saw the publication of a collected edition of his works (The Poems of Richard Wilbur), the appearance of his fi rst book for children (Loudmouse), his sharing of the Bollingen Translation Prize, and his appointment as Olin Professor of English at Wesleyan. Further awards, travels, and honorary degrees followed in the next few years, but the most significant event of this period was undoubtedly the publication, in 1969, of his new collection, Walking to Sleep: New Poems and Translation, which was followed in 1970 by the printing of Digging for China: A Poem. By the end of the 1960s Wilbur was seen as one of the most eminent figures in American poetry, but his verse was also increasingly considered (by some critics, at least) as remote from the turmoil of the times—a kind of mannered, even Mandarin formalism that was often contrasted with the strongly personal, heavily “confessional” verse of ROBERT LOWELL and his many imitators. Certain critics of Wilbur accused his work of being tame, timid, and sometimes even trite; Wilbur’s admirers, on the other hand, valued his continuing commitment to form, sanity, craft, and restraint. The 1970s brought further distinctions and achievements. In 1971 Wilbur won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award, and the Prix Henri Desfeuilles. His translation of Molière’s The School for Scandal appeared that same year, and in 1972 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Another book for children (Opposites) was issued in

1973—the same year in which Wilbur also won the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 1974 his book Seed Leaves appeared in a limited edition, his edition of Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was published, and Wilbur was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This honor was followed, in 1976, by his election as chancellor of the same organization and by the publication that same year of two major books: The Mind-Reader: New Poems and Response: Prose Pieces, 1953–1976. In 1977 Wilbur began a nearly 10-year stint as writer in residence at Smith College, while 1978 saw the publication of his translation of Molière’s The Learned Ladies and his selection, once more, as winner of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award. In 1980 he was once again elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1981 Seven Poems and Advice from a Muse was published. During all these years, of course, he continued to receive numerous honorary degrees. Awards, prizes, degrees, and other distinctions have continued to be showered on Wilbur into the 21st century, but the most important achievements of any writer are the works he creates. For Wilbur, these have included such books as The Whale and Other Uncollected Translations (1982), New and Collected Poems (1988), More Opposites (1991), A Game of Catch (1994), Runaway Opposites (1995), a translation of Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage (1997), The Catbird’s Song: Prose Pieces, 1963–1995 (1997), The Disappearing Alphabet (1998), Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (2000), Opposites, More Opposites, and a Few Differences (2000), The Pig in the Spigot (2000), and the monumental Collected Poems, 1943–2004 (2005). More works, including a translation of Corneille’s The Theatre of Illusion were published in 2007, and even the publications listed here only begin to scratch of the surface of Wilbur’s astonishing productivity; in 2009 the Library of Congress catalog listed 126 separate items (including books, recordings, editions, and translations). In the fi nal decades of his life he has become one of America’s most widely respected and most prolific writers, author of some of the most important poems and translations of his era. His life, in short,

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has achieved the kind of grace, balance, sanity, good humor, and deeper thoughtfulness expressed in so many of his poems.

“The Beautiful Changes” (1947) In this early poem, which shares the title of Wilbur’s fi rst book, the speaker describes the nature of beauty: how it simultaneously transforms—and is transformed by—everything with which it is juxtaposed, thereby suggesting new and enriched perceptions both of itself and of its surroundings in ways that create a sense of wonder and renewal. The wit of this poem begins with its title, whose key terms can suggest at least three meanings. On the one hand, the title may imply that the beautiful (noun) changes (verb) to something else, or it may imply that the beautiful (noun) is itself changed (verb), or it may seem to refer to beautiful (adjective) changes (noun). Such ambiguity and playfulness with language are typical of much of Wilbur’s writing; as do the works of the 17th-century metaphysical poets whom he admires so much, his verse demands a reader’s alert intelligence. He rarely wastes a word: His lines are often heavy with multiple meanings, yet the poems move with grace and ease, almost never seeming cluttered or clogged. The present lyric begins with literal movement: The speaker imagines a person (abstractly described as “One”) who is “wading a Fall meadow” (language that already establishes the main metaphor of the first stanza, which likens a field to a lake and develops that likeness over six distinct lines in the manner of a “metaphysical conceit,” or extended comparison). Just as the meadow reminds the walker of a lake, so the slightest thought of the speaker’s beloved reminds him of the astonishingly blue beauty of Lake Lucerne, in Switzerland. By the end of the final stanza the abstract opening emphasis on “One” has given way to an intensely personal relationship between the speaker and the beloved “you” (line 5). One of the most impressive aspects of this poem (and indeed of many works by Wilbur) is the way it manages to combine form and flexibility. On the page, the poem appears highly regular in shape:

Each stanza consists of six lines, with two long lines followed by two shorter lines followed in turn by two long ones. Yet, the lengths of the lines (as measured by the number of syllables) are irregular and unpredictable, and so Wilbur succeeds in creating a poem that looks more strictly patterned than it actually is. Likewise, his pattern of rhyme in each stanza is both regular and loose (abacdc), creating the effect of order and symmetry without seeming heavy-handed, monotonous, or constricting. Similarly, his skillful use of enjambment (in which one line flows freely into the next, with punctuation at the end) gives the poem a smooth and easy flow—an effect enhanced by the fact that so many of the fi nal words in each line are verbs. The effectiveness of the poem is also enriched by the ways Wilbur plays with language in unexpected ways, as when he turns the noun valley into a verb in line 6, or when he uses the noun-adjective combination of leaf leafier (in line 11) almost to mimic the close relation he describes between the mantis and the leaf, or when he plays throughout the poem with heavy assonance (i.e., repetition of vowel sounds), especially in lines 1–2, 6, 11–12, and 13. Wilbur’s poem itself, as do the beautiful things and actions it describes, helps enhance our sense of the beauty of the world around us, and thus it seems perfectly appropriate that this work ends with a word referring to the effect it both describes and creates—the effect of “wonder” (l. 18).

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this poem with Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” particularly in terms of what the two works imply about the relationship between nature and art and between the speaker and his audience. How do the poems differ in purpose and tone? 2. Contrast this love lyric with T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Why does Wilbur emphasize natural imagery while Eliot emphasizes an urban setting? In which poem is irony a more prominent feature, and why? How does the speaker of Wilbur’s poem differ from the speaker of Eliot’s? Which poem is fi nally more affirmative?

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3. Compare and contrast this poem and Ezra Pound’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” How do both poems use imagery of nature to discuss love? Which poem seems more abstract, and why? How do both works avoid sentimentality (a common fault of love poems)?

“A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness” (1950) As its title punningly suggests, this poem celebrates a world of sensory (or “sensible”) experience—a world of material objects, tangible things, and physical sensations—as opposed to a world that is purely abstract, rational, or reasonable (“sensible”). The first half of the work describes the movement of the spirit toward an entirely spiritual realm, but the second half implores the spirit not to abandon (but indeed to embrace and mesh with) the world known through the senses. In the final stanza the speaker subtly reminds his readers of one of the most famous instances of the union of body and soul—the Christian Incarnation, in which God became man and in which the spirit fully united with the flesh. In the manner of the 17th-century metaphysical writers whom Wilbur admires deeply (in fact, the title of the poem is adapted from one of those writers, Thomas Traherne), the first three stanzas of the work amount to a metaphysical conceit (an extended comparison, developed over many lines). Although the comparison of the movement of the soul to the movement of camels across a desert may seem remote from common experience, that is part of the poem’s point: The imagery, at this stage, is appropriately abstract and distant, because the poem associates the moving camels with the common human temptation to turn one’s back on the familiar world of everyday life. The camel imagery also, however, foreshadows the imagery at the very end of the poem, where the Christian nativity is implied, thereby reminding us of the wise men, presumably on camels, who followed a star across a desert to discover the perfect union of the world and the spirit. By tying the imagery of the opening stanzas to the imagery of the final lines, Wilbur achieves the kind of unity prized by writers and

critics with a strong interest in formal harmony and coherence (including Wilbur himself). As the poem proceeds from the remote imagery of its opening lines, its language becomes more and more obviously religious, especially in describing the halos depicted in paintings of medieval Christian saints (lines 15–18), until it finally culminates in phrasing that is simultaneously familiar (as in the references to trees, country creeks, and barns) and strangely mysterious and otherworldly (as in the reference to the “supernova” [l. 26]). The final two words—“light incarnate”—not only look back to the imagery of lines 13–18 (thus enhancing the poem’s formal unity) but also imply the birth of Christ. (The phrase gains extra emphasis because it breaks the previously established rhyme scheme.) Meanwhile, the poem also offers its share of the typical pleasures we associate with Wilbur’s verse, such as his use of striking imagery (as in the “tall camels of the spirit” [l. 1]), clever sound effects (as in the reference to the “sawmill shrill of the locust” [l. 3]), alliteration (as in the reference to “whole honey” [l. 3]), literary allusions (as in his reference to Traherne both in the title and in line 6), and assonance (as in the reference to “sunken sub” [l. 24]). Here as in so many other poems by Wilbur, one has the sense that every line (in fact, every syllable) has been carefully crafted and polished. It is as if Wilbur, in writing this poem, has tried to enact the very kind of incarnation the poem celebrates—a perfect union of thought and imagery, idea and sound.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with T. S. Eliot’s poem “Journey of the Magi.” How do the poems resemble and differ from each other in their imagery, tones, points of view, and themes? 2. Compare and contrast this work with Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning.” How do the poems differ in their implied attitudes toward Christianity, and how are they similar in their emphasis on the importance of the world we know through our senses? In what ways do both poems reject the abstract and ideal in favor of concrete, material reality? 3. Compare and contrast this work with Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Plain Sense of Things.” What

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attitudes do the poems take toward the relation between the imagination and reality? Why does Stevens emphasize such plain, concrete imagery in his poem? Why is the imagery in Wilbur’s poem often more abstract? How is the use of imagery in each poem somewhat ironic in view of the argument each work makes?

“Ceremony” (1950) This poem opens by mentioning a painting by the French artist Jean-Frédéric Bazille (perhaps his View of the Village of Castelnau-le-Lez) in which a woman wearing a “striped blouse” sits in a pastoral landscape; the speaker of the poem responds to the potential charge that the woman seems too superior to the landscape to be really connected to it. The speaker says that he prefers the wit of Bazille’s painting to a possible alternative painting featuring a fictional nymph whose relation to the landscape may seem closer but who is also entirely artificial. It is (the poem suggests) when civilized people and things are juxtaposed with natural surroundings that we become most aware of our own relationship with our natural environment and of the wildness inherent in nature. The opening line of this poem encapsulates the work’s central subject: the human (symbolized by the geometrically precise “striped blouse”) and nature (symbolized by the open “clearing”) united by art (symbolized by the reference to Bazille). Appropriately enough (given its argument and subject) this poem is itself more highly structured than some others by Wilbur: There is no variation in the line lengths (each line, like the stripes of the blouse, is regular, consisting of exactly 10 syllables), the rhyme scheme is plainly apparent and also highly regular (abcabc), and punctuation at the end of many lines is more prominently emphasized than in other works by Wilbur. The poem thus has a more predictable, controlled, and stately movement than is found (for instance) in “The Beautiful Changes,” another text that also emphasizes relations between humans and nature. In addition, “Ceremony”—in its diction, its imagery, and its allusions—seems a

more mannered, more obviously “literary” poem than that earlier poem; the speaker is obviously a cultured person, familiar with French impressionist art, with the conventions of classical literature (such as nymphs), and with the figures of British mythology (such as Sabrina). Through a variety of devices (such as the direct address of line 2, the reference to “we” in line 6, and the personal pronoun in line 13), the speaker invites us to share his own responses, but many readers are perhaps likely to fi nd the whole performance a bit too precious and mannered, a little too artificial and contrived, however artful the work’s design. It is surely poems like “Ceremony” (skillful though it undeniably is) that have contributed to Wilbur’s reputation in some quarters as a poet who is sometimes too artificial—in every sense of that word—for his own good.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Dance,” which concerns a painting by Brueghel. How do the poems partly imitate (in structure and phrasing) the paintings they describe? What do the poems imply about the relations between art and life and between painting and poetry? Do you think Wilbur would admire the painting Williams describes? Justify your answer. 2. Compare and contrast this work with A LLEN GINSBERG’s poem “On Burroughs’ Work.” What do both poems imply about the relationship of art to reality? How are the diction and tone of each work appropriate to the subject and argument of each poem? 3. Ezra Pound’s poem “To Whistler, American” is also a work in which a specific painter and particular paintings are important, but how do the purpose, style, tone, and diction of that poem differ from those of Wilbur?

“The Death of a Toad” (1950) The speaker notices a toad that has lost its leg after being run over by a power mower; it hobbles to

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the edge of the garden, takes refuge under some leaves, and looks out upon the lawn as its life and blood drain from its body. The speaker imagines the toad’s transition to a mystical realm of death, but the poem ends by returning to a focus on the toad’s open but unseeing eyes as the daylight moves across the lawn. Here, as in “The Beautiful Changes,” Wilbur uses three six-line stanzas featuring a regular rhyme scheme (in this case, aabcbc) and a roughly similar appearance on the page, but he also introduces an element of freedom into his line lengths: The fi rst line of stanza 1 (for instance) consists of eight syllables, while the fi rst line of stanza 2 consists of nine, and the fi rst line of stanza 3 consists of 10. Along with these unpredictable line lengths is a looseness of meter: Although the fi rst line is solidly iambic (in other words, revealing a pattern in which an unaccented syllable is followed by an accented syllable), the rest of the poem shows a great deal of variation, and in fact, Wilbur makes very effective use of heavy accents on key words (often verbs) at the beginnings of lines, as in lines 2, 6, and 8. Enjambment (running lines together without punctuation) is skillfully employed to give the poem momentum, while assonance, alliteration, and an abrupt rhythm are all wittily used in the phrase “hobbling hop.” The toad’s death, meanwhile, obviously serves to symbolize the mortality common to all living things, including the humans who have (paradoxically) invented a destructive machine in order to cultivate natural beauty. Wilbur makes us pause and care about a death that might otherwise be unnoticed or unmourned, balancing a real sense of loss with poetic playfulness in his choice of words (as in the assonance of “monotone” [l. 12], in which the sound of the word itself mimics the concept the word describes, or in the extravagant and partly whimsical reference to “lost Amphibia’s emperies” [l. 14]). If the poem has a flaw, it may be that the tone of the opening lines of stanza 3 is too playful, too clever, but by the end of the work Wilbur has again found his proper balance, and the poem ends on a note of seriousness that seems appropriate to the death even of so small and seemingly insignificant a creature.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast the significance of mowing in this poem and in Robert Frost’s “Mowing.” In which poem is man more in harmony with nature? Why would the tone and imagery of lines 13–14 of Wilbur’s poem seem inappropriate in Frost’s work? How is the overall tone of Wilbur’s poem more pessimistic? 2. Compare and contrast this poem with Marianne Moore’s “To a Snail.” How do both poems manage to take something seemingly insignificant and find deeper meaning in it? Which poem seems more abstract, and why? Which poem seems more inherently interesting, and why? 3. Compare and contrast this work with Philip Levine’s poem “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives.” Discuss the tone, diction, imagery, and implications of the two works. What do they imply about the relations between animals and humans? Which is the more “romantic” of the two works, and why?

“Years-End” (1950) This poem, which is a meditation on change, decay, and death, begins (appropriately enough) by describing winter’s descent in the form of snowfall on a town. The poem then offers a number of related images of living things frozen (sometimes literally) in time: falling leaves half-trapped in ice, once-living ferns imprinted on rock-solid fossils, wooly mammoths frozen in the arctic, and animals and humans embedded in the ashes of the volcanic eruption of Pompeii. Death, the speaker implies, enters too suddenly for most people, who want “more time” not only to live but to give shape and meaning to their lives—lives that often end all too abruptly. This poem exhibits many of the virtues of phrasing and form that are so typical of Wilbur’s work, including heavy use of assonance and alliteration (as in line 1), punning phrases (as in the reference to “settlement” in line 2, which can be read as referring both to a town and to a settling action), a highly regular rhyme scheme (abbacc), and an especially emphatic use of iambic pentameter meter (a rhythm

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in which the line consists of 10 syllables, with the accents usually falling on syllables that are evennumbered). Often the rhythm in Wilbur’s poems is not so strictly predictable, but in this poem the regular iambic beat gives the work a slow, measured, leisurely pace that seems appropriate to the subject matter, which focuses on the steady and inevitable passage of time. Of course, in poetry as in any other aspect of life, once a regular pattern has been established, any variation from it becomes especially noticeable, and thus Wilbur uses departures from the steady iambic beat to emphasize key words and phrases, as in the double-stressed reference to the “soft street” (l. 3), or the triple-stressed description of “late leaves down” (l. 8), or the strong emphasis on verbs at the very beginnings of lines 10 and 11. This poem seems unified, however, not only by its conservative stanzaic form and its regular meter but also by its consistent imagery. It opens and closes with reference to snowfall, and indeed downward movement of all kinds is emphasized throughout the work, from the falling of snow and the falling of leaves to the submersion of ferns and mammoths and the falling of the ashes of Vesuvius. Each of the examples discussed in the middle stanzas is merely one more instance of the general themes of mutability and mortality, and so the “argument” of the poem seems supported by the weight of overwhelming evidence. Yet, the movement of the work is not random: It progresses from a focus on the death of present-day vegetation (the leaves) to the death of vegetation millions of years ago (the ferns) to the death of prehistoric animals (the mammoths) to the death of an ancient animal (the dog at Pompeii) to the death of ancient humans (the people at Pompeii) to the implied death of modern persons, including the speaker and his readers. Unlike the vegetation and animals, and even unlike the people at Pompeii (caught unaware by the volcanic eruption), the poet and his readers are aware of their impending and unavoidable doom, and indeed in the final stanza the speaker of the poem, who had earlier spoken simply as an individual (in line 7), now makes common cause with his reader (in lines 25–26): It is our awareness of mortality, ironically, that unites us and makes us truly human. In the final line, the “New-year bells” (symbols of the present and future)

are juxtaposed with the “snow” (symbol of death) in a way that epitomizes the inescapable paradox of all life, which is vital now but is also doomed to die.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” How is snow imagery used in each work? What does each poem imply about human mortality? How do the rhyme scheme and rhythm contribute to the effectiveness of each work? 2. Compare and contrast this work with Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man.” Discuss the use of winter imagery in both works and the ways both poets use such imagery as occasions for meditations on existence. What do both poems imply about the nature of human life in particular? 3. Compare and contrast this work with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “The Snow Storm.” How is animal imagery used in both works? What role (if any) does death play in both works? How do the poems differ in tone and ultimate implications?

“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (1956) The speaker of this poem describes awakening to the sound of laundry being hung out to dry on a rope controlled by pulleys; in his half-conscious state, he imagines that the hanging clothes resemble bodiless angels, moving (or not moving) in response to the changing or dying breeze. The speaker says that his “soul shrinks” from the idea of being fully awake, with all the burdens of consciousness and memory that wakefulness implies; he would prefer to stay in bed and watch the beautifully undulating laundry. Finally, however, the spirit must reunite with the flesh and must accept the material world, and in the end the speaker wishes that the clean clothes should be worn (not merely viewed) even by people who are inevitably imperfect, thus maintaining the “difficult balance” of body and soul, of earth and heaven. Here as in his poem “A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness,” Wilbur concedes the attractiveness of the spiritual realm but insists

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that spirit must be united with flesh if life is to seem authentic, meaningful, and rich. The artist who pretends that spirit alone is sufficient denies a basic truth of existence—a truth this poem fi nally affi rms. The poem opens as the speaker’s eyes open; our own awakening, developing consciousness as readers, thus mimics his. In a poem centrally concerned with the spirit, Wilbur wittily plays on the meaning of the phrase “spirited from sleep” (l. 2), while the imagery of the soul as it “Hangs” (a metrically emphasized verb) “bodiless” already foreshadows the ensuing central imagery of the hanging clothes (l. 3). In a clever pun that introduces that imagery, the speaker says that his vision is “awash” in “angels”—a noun that not only creates a strong visual impression of floating whiteness but also suggests the traditional role of angels as messengers who convey important meanings, as these “angels” certainly do by the time the poem has fi nished. The speaker creates a strong sense of immediacy and presence through such words as “Now” (l. 8) and such phrases as “there they are” (l. 7), and the lines themselves (appropriately enough) seem largely free-flowing, unconstrained, unpredictable in their movements, like the movements of the clothes on the line. Wilbur achieves this effect by dispensing altogether with rhyme, by frequently employing enjambment, by irregularly and radically varying the lengths of his line (using sometimes as few as two syllables, sometimes as many as 13), and by breaking lines abruptly (although always in a way that creates effective emphasis, as in lines 4, 17, 20, and 34). The wonderfully apt and beautiful imagery of the empty clothes as angels is juxtaposed with the startling reference to “the punctual rape of every blessed day” (l. 19), a phrase in which Wilbur gets maximal meaning out of each word. The idea of a “punctual rape,” for instance, seems paradoxical, since rapes are usually imagined as unusual, startling events. Here, however, the negative word rape (which ironically echoes the positive word rapt of line 15) is “punctual” in the sense that day arrives with unfailing regularity: The progress of time is inevitable, however painful it may be

and however much we may wish to resist it. Every day is “blesséd” in a double sense: Sometimes we feel like cursing its arrival, but each day is also an almost holy gift and must be accepted as such. Indeed, throughout the poem Wilbur relies on a sense of paradox (as in the reference to “bitter love” in line 26), because, he implies, life itself is paradoxical, and the trick to living fully is to maintain the “difficult balance” (l. 34) of being true to the spirit while accepting the flesh.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Wallace Stevens’s poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” What do the works imply about the relations between flesh and spirit? How does each use religious imagery to convey its themes? What is the role of beauty in each work? 2. Compare and contrast this work with John Crowe Ransom’s poem “Janet Waking.” How do the tones of the two poems differ, especially in their use of humor? What do the works imply about the nature of reality? Why is it significant that the titular figure in Ransom’s poem is a young girl, whereas the speaker in Wilbur’s poem is presumably an adult? 3. Compare and contrast this work with Mary Oliver’s poem “Poppies.” How are the works similar in their imagery and in their implications concerning relations between beauty and day-to-day reality? How does each poem embrace loveliness without denying hard facts?

“The Mind-Reader” (1976) In this poem (an unusually long one for Wilbur), the speaker is an Italian mind reader who performs for pay in a public setting but who feels somewhat cursed, not only by his inability to forget anything but also by the fact that so many different kinds of people besiege him, seeking answers he largely invents. He has little respect for his clients, since so often their concerns and desires seem selfish and petty. He ends by wondering whether there may indeed be a truly omniscient god who knows

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everything and sees the best in everyone; fi nally, though, he merely asks his interlocutor (a professor) for another drink. This work is a dramatic monologue (a poem in which one person directly addresses another, in the process revealing much about his own character and values). The 19th-century English poet Robert Browning made the form famous, and in the present work Wilbur shows real mastery of this kind of writing. The direct address begins with the verb Think in line 1—a verb that seems addressed at fi rst as much to the reader as to anyone else. Indeed, it is not until the very end of the poem that we become aware of the ostensible addressee—the professor who pours the mind reader another drink. In the meantime, the poem rambles in a relaxed and meditative way. Appropriately enough in a work that seems so casually conversational, Wilbur here dispenses with rhyme or with any strict metrical pattern; the lines are usually 10 syllables long, but sometimes they are a syllable or two longer. Breaks in the lines correspond to breaks in the speaker’s train of thought. As the poem proceeds, we gradually realize that we are listening to the voice of the mind reader named in the title, but we also become aware that we, ourselves, are functioning as mind readers as we enter into the consciousness of this highly thoughtful speaker. The poet, too, of course, is also a mind reader in this work, since it is the poet who has created the mind that speaks. At times it may be argued that the speaker sounds a bit too much like a poet: The phrasing occasionally seems too literary, too artfully contrived, to sound convincingly like the voice of a small-time Italian con artist (see, for instance, lines 33–43). Browning, in his own best dramatic monologues, always manages to create the voice of a personality that seems persuasively separate from his own. In contrast, the mind reader in this poem often sounds like a fairly sophisticated poet. But, perhaps that is part of the point; perhaps Wilbur is implying links between his own art (and artifice) and the sham art of the mind reader, who tells people what they want to hear and who sometimes questions the value of his own performances.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Compare and contrast this work with Ezra Pound’s poem “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.” How does each poet try to characterize the specific speaker of each work? Which poet is more successful in doing so? How are the poems affected by the fact that one is ostensibly a letter and the other is ostensibly spoken? 2. Compare and contrast this work with Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son.” In which poem is the speaker more believably characterized? In which poem is the dramatic situation made more immediately clear? How do the poems differ in their fi nal tones and attitudes?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WILBUR AND HIS WORK 1. Wilbur has had a long and serious interest in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer with whose ideas about art and beauty he often disagrees. Research Wilbur’s ideas about Poe and then discuss how his responses to Poe seem to be reflected in one of his own works, such as “A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness.” 2. Wilbur originally intended to teach literature, probably focusing on English writers of the early 17th century, especially the so-called metaphysical poets (such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell). Study the ideas, ideals, and artistry of the metaphysical poets and then discuss their relevance to Wilbur’s works. 3. Wilbur is often contrasted, in his styles and subjects, with Robert Lowell. In particular, his work is often contrasted with Lowell’s so-called confessional poetry. What is “confessional poetry,” how does Lowell practice it, and in what ways does Wilbur’s work differ from Lowell’s confessional poems? 4. Wilbur himself has indicated his interest in and admiration for the poetry of Wallace Stevens (Butts 43–44). What parallels in tone, manner, diction, and themes can you see between Wilbur’s works and Stevens’s poems? In what

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ways, however, does Wilbur seem to be trying to distinguish himself from Stevens? 5. Somewhat surprisingly, Wilbur has expressed a strong admiration for the poems of William Carlos Williams (Butts 32). How do the writings of these two poets tend to differ in form, meter, and diction? What aspects of Williams’s accomplishments might lead Wilbur to admire his work? 6. Wilbur once remarked that he considered “Ash Wednesday” the best poem written by T. S. Eliot (Butts 36). Why do you think he admired that poem so strongly? What aspects of that poem seem reflected in his best verse? 7. Wilbur once remarked that he admired the poetry of Robert Frost but did not think that he shared many of Frost’s views (Butts 138). Which aspects of Frost’s writings do you think Wilbur probably admired, and why? In what ways do you think he believed his attitudes differed from Frost’s? 8. Wilbur once remarked that he found the poetry of Ezra Pound “emotionally and intellectually narrow” (qtd. in Butts 35). On the basis of your reading of Pound, what do you think Wilbur meant by this claim, and how do you think he tried to avoid the same faults in his own writings? 9. If you had to choose one poem by Wilbur as your favorite, which would it be, and why? If you had to choose one poem by Wilbur as your least favorite, which would it be, and why? Compare and contrast the two poems. 10. Read Wilbur’s poem titled “Cottage Street, 1953,” in which he comments on the works of his fellow poet SYLVIA PLATH. Read some of Plath’s poems in light of Wilbur’s assessment of them and then discuss the value and justice of his assessment.

WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Breslin, James E. From Modern to Contemporary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Butts, William, ed. Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Cummins, Paul F. Richard Wilbur. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1971. Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. A Reader’s Guide to the Poetry of Richard Wilbur. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Harris, Peter. “Forty Years of Richard Wilbur: The Loving Work of an Equilibrist.” Virginia Quarterly Review 66 (Summer 1990): 412–425. Hill, Donald L. Richard Wilbur. New York: Twayne, 1967. Michelson, Bruce. Wilbur’s Poetry: Music in a Scattering Time. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 10: Late Twentieth Century, 1945 to the Present—Richard Wilbur.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http:// www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/ wilbur.html. Accessed December 10, 2006. Salinger, Wendy, ed. Richard Wilbur’s Creation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. Waggoner, Hyatt. American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Wilbur, Richard. “The Art of Poetry.” Interview with Helen McCloy Ellison, Ellesa Clay High, Peter A. Stitt. Paris Review 72 (Winter 1977). Available online. URL: http://www.theparisreview. org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3509. Accessed December 10, 2006. ———. Collected Poems: 1943–2004. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2004.

Robert C. Evans

Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) Of course, it is a pity that so much of all creative work is so closely related to the personality of the one who does it. (Preface to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof )

A

t the height of his powers, the American playwright, novelist, poet, and short story writer Tennessee Williams enjoyed fame and fortune usually reserved for Hollywood actors and directors. Born in rural Mississippi, Williams is known for the “southern gothic” style of his works and their emotional range, which often break with conventional modes of expression and tap into deeply felt human desires and needs, creating an often-grotesque portrait of 20th-century life. In his dramas, for which he is best known, Williams drew upon his own family background, especially in his depiction of women driven or destroyed by frustrated sexuality or mental instability. Replete with southern charm, broken relationships, substance abuse, and sexual frustration, Williams’s life was as dramatic as any of his plays. As do his best stage productions, his personal story weaves fact with fiction and imagination with reality. Christened Thomas Lanier Williams III upon his March 26, 1911, birth in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams was the second of three children born to Cornelius Coffi n (C. C.) Williams, a traveling salesman, and Edwina Dakin Williams, a housewife. Until 1918, he, Edwina, and his older sister, Rose, lived with Edwina’s parents, Walter and Rosina Dakin, while C. C. spent nearly all his time on the road. They moved frequently in Williams’s early years, following his grandfather Dakin’s career in the Episcopal clergy and occupying rectories in

Nashville, Tennessee, and three small Mississippi towns (Columbus, Canton, and Clarksdale). In 1916, as Williams approached school age, he contracted a near-fatal case of diphtheria that, coupled with a kidney infection, kept him housebound for 18 months. As a result of his poor health, both the schoolchildren and his father, who nicknamed Williams “Miss Nancy,” ridiculed his masculinity. This emotional form of abuse only grew worse after Williams’s brother, Dakin, eight years his junior, proved to be an extrovert who outshone Williams athletically and socially. By the time C. C. became branch manager with the International Shoe Company in 1918 and moved his family into a small St. Louis, Missouri, apartment, Williams had developed an introspective and sensitive personality. The move to St. Louis proved traumatic not only for Williams—derided for his southern drawl and “sissy” mannerisms—but also for his mother, Edwina, who identified as a southern matriarch and never found her bearings in the Midwest. Edwina and C. C.’s already strained relationship grew increasingly contentious, and the cramped St. Louis apartment only magnified the tension. In addition to the familial alienation it caused, the “tragic” move, as Williams later called it, taught the young boy about class difference. Realizing for the first time he was poor, Williams reacted to the way the wealthy treat the impoverished with “shock and rebellion” (Where I Live 59). The shock remained with him for the rest

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of his life; many of his important plays focus on social inequality. Williams developed a literary disposition early in life. His mother read to him frequently and bought him a typewriter when he was 12. As a student at Ben Blewett Junior High, he published a short story in the school newspaper and a poem in the class yearbook. During his secondary school years, first at Soldan High and later at University City High, he won a cash prize in an essay contest and published a short story in Weird Tales. Meanwhile, his father’s habitual drinking became chronic. Edwina’s resentment, both of C. C.’s angry outbursts and of the family’s social standing, intensified. Rose’s behavior turned erratic and rebellious, prompting C. C. and Edwina to send her in 1925 to All Saints College, a private boarding school in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The change of scenery failed to improve her condition, and after two years, she returned to St. Louis. Unable to cope with a stressful home life, Rose suffered a mental breakdown. In 1937 her parents committed her to St. Vincent’s, a sanitarium near St. Louis. There, a psychiatrist diagnosed her with schizophrenia. Six years later, after electroshock therapy and insulin treatment, which induced convulsions, her condition remained unchanged. Edwina then authorized a lobotomy, a surgical operation that involved severing the brain’s prefrontal cortex. During this time such operations were commonplace, although today such a procedure is considered to be a drastic treatment reserved for only the most severe psychiatric disorders. Although the operation rendered her more sedate, it did not cure Williams’s sister. She remained institutionalized until her death in 1996. As Rose’s psychiatric problems emerged, Williams struggled with his own identity. Upon graduating high school in 1929, he enrolled at the University of Missouri at Columbia, planning to study journalism. After completing his third year, despite more success as a writer—he won honorable mention in the Dramatic Arts Club contest for his one-act play, Beauty Is the Word—poor grades, especially in then-required Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) military training classes, prompted C. C. to force Williams to quit school. By 1932, in the middle of the Great

Depression, the family had little money, so Williams took a job clerking for his father’s company. After long days working for the International Shoe Company, Williams would go home, “tanking up on black coffee,” and write most of the night, producing dozens of poems and short stories. In 1933 “Stella for Star” won first prize in the St. Louis Writers Guild’s annual Winifred Irwin short story contest. By 1935 the regimen had exhausted him; he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. Because William was medically unfit to return to his day job, his father allowed him to visit Memphis, Tennessee, where he lived for the summer with his grandparents. During this time he read the works of the Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov. Delighted by Chekhov’s plays, Williams began writing his own. Later that summer, when the Memphis Garden Players produced his one-act Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!, Williams saw his work staged for the fi rst time. On the heels of this success Williams returned to St. Louis and took courses at Washington University. In 1936 he began writing for the Mummers, an amateur troupe dedicated to producing cuttingedge drama. The Mummers performed Williams’s first full-length plays, Candles to the Sun and Fugitive Kind. The following year, distressed by his sister’s psychological deterioration, Williams left St. Louis for the University of Iowa, where he studied playwriting under E. C. Mabie and E. P. Conkle and wrote Spring Storm and Not about Nightingales. Williams graduated in 1938 with a B.A. in English and returned to St. Louis determined to make it as a writer. Williams sent his works to publishers, production companies, and writing contests. While awaiting feedback, he traveled to New Orleans looking for work. Initially shocked by the seemingly amoral lifestyle and permissive atmosphere of the French Quarter, Williams quickly fell in love with the city. Vowing to return, he traveled with a friend to California, where he received good news: One of his contest submissions had paid off. The Group Theater, a subsidiary of the Theater Guild, which sought work from young playwrights, awarded “Tennessee Williams” $100 for American Blues, a collection of one-act plays. Exceeding the contest’s age limitation

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by three years, Williams had invented a pen name to disguise his identity, choosing Tennessee because his ancestors had “fought the Indians for Tennessee and I had already discovered that the life of a young writer was going to be something similar to the defense of a stockade against a band of savages” (Where I Live 59). Despite the relatively small sum of money, the award turned out to be Williams’s big break, calling him to the attention of Audrey Wood, one of New York’s most successful agents. Between 1939 and 1944 Williams’s career underwent a series of ups and downs. A $1,000 Rockefeller Foundation Grant enabled him to move to New York, where he studied drama at the New School for Social Research and worked on Battle of Angels, a play about a woman who cares for her cancer-stricken husband while having an affair with a mysterious traveler. Battle of Angels, his first professionally produced play, premiered in Boston in December 1940. On its debut night most audience members left early when a smoke machine malfunctioned, and the Boston City Council censored the play for mixing religion with sexuality. Despite the negative response the play foreshadowed Williams’s lifelong obsession with the clash between human sexuality and social mores. After the failure he collaborated with Donald Windham on a dramatic adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s short story “You Touched Me,” which premiered in Cleveland to mixed reviews in 1943. During these years Williams lived in near-poverty, supporting his writing and vagabond lifestyle by working a series of part-time jobs. Yet, he traveled frequently, living in, among other places, New York, New Orleans, St. Louis, Miami, Key West, and Hollywood, where, in 1943, Audrey Wood secured him work as a contract writer for MGM. Williams’s script The Gentleman Caller led to his first major theatrical success. After he reworked the script for the stage, The Glass Menagerie premiered in Chicago in December 1944 to rave reviews. The play performed well enough to secure a Broadway opening on March 31, 1945, at the Playhouse Theatre. That night, Williams received 24 curtain calls and became an overnight sensation. Two weeks later The Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award; shortly thereafter it won the Donaldson and

the Sydney Howard Memorial Awards. Set during the Great Depression in a cramped St. Louis apartment similar to the one Williams knew as a child, the play tells the story of Tom Wingfield, a young poet yearning for independence from his overbearing mother, Amanda, and his crippled sister, Laura. In Williams’s most autobiographical work Amanda and Laura were modeled on Edwina and Rose Williams. With its piercing psychological insights, complex characters, and emotional dialogue, the play was a revelation for American theatergoers, who had never experienced the unconventional techniques Williams used. As he explained in the play’s production notes: Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn’t be, trying to escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or interpreting experience, but is actually or should be attempting to fi nd a closer approach, a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are. The straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness. (xix–xxii)

The Glass Menagerie catapulted Williams into national fame and provided him financial security for the first time in his life. He went from renting spare bedrooms and worrying about how he would pay for food to living in a first-class Manhattan hotel, where he ordered room service for every meal. The excitement quickly gave way to a feeling of spiritual dislocation, prompting him to move to Mexico, where he began drafting “The Poker Night,” the play that would become A Streetcar Named Desire. In August 1945 he returned to the United States for the Broadway premier of You Touched Me! That year New Directions published 27 Wagons of Cotton and Other One Act Plays, a collection that explores familiar Williams themes, such as the alienation of the individual from society and the conflict between spiritual fulfillment and the desires of the flesh. Over

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the next two years, while dividing his time between Nantucket, in Massachusetts, and New Orleans, Williams wrote Summer and Smoke, which premiered in Dallas on July 8, 1947. On December 3 of that year, A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway for the first of 855 performances. A runaway sensation, the play starred Jessica Tandy as Blanche and Marlon Brando as Stanley, a role he reprised for the Academy Award–winning 1951 film version. In addition to its commercial success, the play won Williams his second Drama Critics’ Circle and Donaldson Awards as well as his first Pulitzer Prize. Over the next decade and a half Williams composed several plays that have entered the permanent American theater repertoire: The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), and Night of the Iguana (1961). Though not all were smash hits, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Night of the Iguana each won a Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and Cat earned Williams a second Pulitzer. During this period he composed a novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950); published a collection of poetry, In the Winter of Cities (1956); wrote an original screenplay, Baby Doll (1956); and collaborated on film adaptations of Menagerie (1950), Streetcar (1951), Rose Tattoo (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1959), and Orpheus Descending (renamed The Fugitive Kind, 1960). Despite his fame, fortune, and elevated literary reputation, Williams failed to achieve lasting happiness. His relationship with Frank Merlo, his lover from 1948 until 1961, was often tempestuous and strained. He continued to blame himself for leaving Rose in St. Louis just as her psyche was fracturing. From 1947 onward he supported her financially, moving her to a private sanitarium in Connecticut in 1949. Yet, Williams never alleviated his guilty conscience, which can be seen in the unstable female characters and rose imagery to which he frequently returned in his works. Adding to his depression, his beloved grandfather, Walter Dakin, died in 1955. Two years later Williams’s father, with whom he never developed an understanding, also died, leaving emotional scars that never fully healed. In the

late 1950s his confidence began eroding, only temporarily buoyed by Night of the Iguana’s success. To alleviate his misery, he turned to alcohol and prescription pills. When Merlo, with whom Williams remained friends, died of lung cancer in 1963, Williams became an alcoholic and drug addict. With his substance dependency supported by Dr. Max Jacobson, who gave Williams barbiturates and injected him with amphetamines, Williams entered a six-year period he would later call his “Stoned Age.” Finally, in September 1969, Williams’s younger brother, Dakin, intervened and placed Williams in the mental ward at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. Forced by physicians to undergo immediate withdrawal, Williams suffered two heart attacks and several seizures during his three-month hospital stay. In December he returned to Key West, where he had owned a home since 1949. Within two years he began using drugs again, a habit that plagued him for the rest of his life. Although he received several lifetime achievement awards and honorary degrees in his fi nal 20 years, Williams spent the last half of his career in steady decline. Unfavorable reviews piled up. Some were vitriolic. Critics portrayed him as an eccentric washed-up old man compensating for deteriorating skill by reverting to abstraction and overwrought symbolism. In a 1970 television interview Williams further damaged his reputation by discussing his history of sexual promiscuity with men. In his last two decades he continued to write prolifically, publishing his memoirs, a poetry collection, two short story collections, and a novel. During this period he managed to produce a new play nearly every year. With the exception of Small Craft Warnings (1972), all were commercial failures. On February 24, 1983, Williams died alone in a New York hotel room. He choked on a pharmaceutical bottle cap, apparently having used it to spoon two sleeping pills into his mouth. His brother, Dakin, had Williams interred at Mt. Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, against his stated wish to be cremated. Williams wanted his ashes scattered off the coast of Key West, where his favorite poet, Hart Crane, had committed suicide by leaping off a steamship. At the time of his death, his standing with audiences and critics

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alike was at a 40-year low. The strange circumstances surrounding his death echoed many of the grotesque situations of his dramas; Williams died a colorful yet tragic character.

The Glass Menagerie (1944) The Glass Menagerie was Tennessee Williams’s fi rst great success, thrusting him from obscurity into the limelight, where, for two decades, he shared with A RTHUR M ILLER distinction as America’s most important playwright. Opening in December 1944 in Chicago, Menagerie moved to New York’s Playhouse Theatre on March 31 of the following year. Quickly racking up several prestigious theater prizes including the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, the play’s Broadway run lasted 561 performances. Even though Williams went on to write several other critically acclaimed works, many literary scholars consider Menagerie his best work. During the course of seven scenes the play records the Wingfield family’s struggle to survive in St. Louis during the Great Depression. Living at home with his domineering mother, Amanda, and his psychologically troubled sister, Laura, Tom, a young poet, yearns to escape both the cramped apartment and the stifl ing responsibilities of home life. When Amanda discovers that Laura has dropped out of business school, she becomes obsessed with fi nding a suitor and fi nancial supporter for her daughter. After initially balking at his mother’s suggestion to join in the husband search, Tom invites his friend, Jim, to dinner. When Jim arrives, Laura is shocked to discover that he is the same man she had secretly loved in high school. Although Laura’s anxiety gets the better of her and she passes the meal resting on the sofa, she eventually responds to Jim’s extroverted personality. They dance together and share a kiss, but the romantic interlude is cut short when Jim breaks one of Laura’s beloved glass figurines. The amorous spell broken, Jim tells Laura that he is engaged to another woman and that he can never see her again. After Jim leaves, Amanda blames Tom, accusing him of sabotaging the evening. In response, Tom storms

out of the apartment. A few days later he leaves home for good. Williams’s most autobiographical play, The Glass Menagerie was written to work through his painful early adult years. Williams crafted Tom in his own image and even named the character after himself— only in his late 20s did Williams change his name from Thomas to Tennessee. As does Tom Wingfield, Williams spent his later youth, adolescence, and early adulthood in St. Louis; attended Soldan High School; and wrote poetry while working at a shoe company. More important, as does Tom, Williams felt trapped between his individual goals and his familial obligations. According to Lyle Leverich, Williams’s most thorough biographer, the playwright maintained two prevailing commitments: his writing career and his sister, Rose. Throughout Williams’s life, especially his early adult years, his obligations to each conflicted. In 1937, just when Rose was losing her grip on reality, Williams left St. Louis to study English at the University of Iowa. While Rose received questionable treatments in a psychiatric ward, Williams found therapy in his writing. Rose had no artistic outlet, no coping mechanism for the social and familial pressure to conform. Nor does Laura Wingfield, whose crippled leg is an outward sign of her psychological weaknesses. The autobiographical correlations extend to Williams’s parents. Years after seeing Laurette Taylor’s legendary performance as Amanda Wingfield, Edwina Williams privately joked that “Mrs. Winfield” was her alias. As does Edwina, Amanda never adjusts to midwestern urban life, which she finds unaccommodating to southern values. Like Edwina, Amanda is a southern matriarch with a dominating personality, especially when dealing with her children. Yet, like Edwina, Amanda is no villain. Rather, her character is complex and often sympathetic. During the course of the play, she is callous and tender, selfish and generous, arrogant and vulnerable. Although Tom delivers the play’s most poignant lines, most critics consider Amanda the most rounded character. In contrast to his mother’s dynamic onstage presence, Tom’s father, “a telephone man who fell in love with long distances,” is only a memory, symbolized by an oversized photograph hanging on the living room

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wall. Williams’s father, C. C. Williams, did not “skip the light fantastic out of town” and abandon his family. Nevertheless, his job, his disputes with Edwina, and his poor parenting skills estranged him from the rest of his family. Whereas the elder Wingfield physically deserts his wife and children, the elder Williams abandoned them emotionally and psychologically. Although the biographical correspondences help explain Williams’s motivation for writing it, the play’s critical success and lasting appeal stem from its use of unconventional techniques to explore enduring human concerns. All the play’s major themes—the quest for individual freedom, the conflict between desire and duty, the young man’s need to forge his own identity—have been written about for centuries. However, Williams dealt with these themes in innovative ways. As he explains in the production notes, he hoped Menagerie would usher in an era of “plastic theater,” which would employ nonrealistic dramatic conventions in order to get underneath surface appearances and more closely approximate the “truth.” Williams opposes realism, which aims to reproduce human experience exactly as it seems to most people. Several aspects of Menagerie are nonrealistic. Tom is both a character who interacts with other characters and the narrator who talks to the audience. In the latter capacity he sets up and comments on the action. The approach allows Williams to control the audience’s interpretation of the play, preventing viewers from overlooking or misunderstanding key elements. For instance, Tom clarifies his own character as a symbol “for the long delayed but always expected something that we live for,” he justifies the significance of several stage devices, and he explains the aims of the theater, which should convey truth “in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” By directly addressing the audience using poetic language instead of everyday speech, Tom draws attention to the artifice of theater. He also does this, albeit more subtly, when speaking to other characters: In Scene 5, for example, he tells Amanda that “Mr. O’Connor has not yet appeared on the scene.” The term scene simultaneously means “in our apartment” and “at this point in the script.” In addition to the narration and dialogue, the set design and stage directions are

nonrealistic. The production notes call for a large screen onto which thematic legends and images are projected. Aiming to evoke memory’s dreamlike quality, the script advises dim lighting and quaint music. The unconventional staging and narration reflect the characters’ inability to untangle reality from appearance, perception, and imagination. The play challenges the distinction between memory and present experience and between the inner and outer self. Amanda’s identity is inseparable from southern codes of courtship and propriety. She measures a woman’s success by the number of “gentlemen callers” she attracts. She revels in her adolescence, proudly announcing she once attracted 17 suitors in a single day. She fancies herself a paragon of social decorum, proper dress, and conversational ability. Yet, Amanda’s actions fall short of her self-perception. The gentleman caller she married as a teenager has since abandoned her. Even though she understands “the art of conversation,” she can neither sell magazine subscriptions nor talk to her son without prompting an argument; she is unable to teach her daughter how to emulate her self-declared social graces. Once she is stripped of the qualities on which she bases her identity, little of that identity remains. While Amanda cannot separate reality from appearances, Tom and Laura cannot separate reality from imagination. Tom resembles the title character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a play that explores the gray area between the inner, imaginative self and what Hamlet calls “that within which passeth show.” As Hamlet does, Tom lives within his mind, brooding about his place in the world and his family obligations. Both men long to escape prescribed social roles passed on by absent fathers. Yet, both men struggle to act. Their stories are marked by indecision and idleness. When each fi nally acts, tragic consequences ensue. In Hamlet, these consequences are overt and tangible; the entire royal family, including Hamlet, dies. In The Glass Menagerie, the consequences are understated and symbolic. By pursuing his artistic ambitions, he revokes his familial responsibility, severing his connection to Laura and burdening Amanda with Laura’s care. The fi rst step Tom takes toward inde-

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pendence—using the electric bill money to join a seaman’s union—leads to the termination of light in the apartment, signaling the symbolic death of a fraternal bond. He returns to the darkness/ death motif in his closing monologue, uttering the now-famous lines “for nowadays the world is lit by lightening.” Whereas Amanda escapes reality by harking back to a mythic southern past, Tom flees by immersing himself in an imaginary future. Laura also surrenders to imagination, but unlike Tom, she cannot interact with the outside world. Laura resembles Shakespeare’s Ophelia, whom Hamlet forsakes in his quest to uncover his father’s killer. Both women display psychological abnormalities, yet male protagonists sacrifice both women: Ophelia is sacrificed by her former lover, Laura by her brother. Social realities prove too much for their psyches to bear. Ophelia commits suicide; Laura flees into a world of old music and glass figurines. One of these figurines, Laura’s cherished unicorn, is the play’s most telling symbol. The unicorn’s beauty lies in its difference from other “plain” horses; the statuette shines more prominently than the other ornaments. Jim similarly assesses Laura. Reminded of his high school nickname for her, Jim tells Laura that, as with “Blue Roses,” her beauty lies in her departure from the norm. Unfortunately, when Jim breaks the unicorn’s horn, the link between beauty and difference breaks permanently. Laura tries to absolve Jim’s guilt, calling the broken horn “an operation” that makes the unicorn/horse “feel less freakish” and more “at home.” The unicorn symbolizes a common character type in Williams’s dramas. Gerald Weales, one of the first scholars to write a comprehensive overview of Williams’s works, labeled this character type the “fugitive kind,” a term he borrowed from an early Williams play of the same name. The fugitive kind is an outcast, a person whose artistic temperament, sexual habits, mental instability, or physical deformity provokes the “insider’s” contempt. Usually, fugitive kinds are outcasts consigned to society’s fringe. In one way or another, Laura, Tom, and Amanda fit the fugitive mold. At 24, unable to cope with the social and familial pressure to conform, Laura

hangs on to the last shreds of sanity by avoiding all social interaction. Amanda fits the type for opposite reasons. Gregarious, pushy, and unabashedly southern, her values and personality strike a dissonant cord with midwestern city dwellers. Remarkably, Williams captures Amanda’s unfavorable St. Louis reception without casting a foil to accentuate her inability to assimilate. Instead, he emphasizes her fugitive standing through a series of failed telephone sales pitches Amanda delivers, hoping to sell magazine subscriptions to fellow Daughters of the American Revolution members. With access only to Amanda’s side of these conversations, the audience witnesses her growing desperation not only to earn a meager supplemental income but also to communicate with her peers. Of all the Wingfield characters, however, Tom most clearly fits the fugitive mold. As he narrates the play from afar, Tom’s artistic ambitions isolate him from friends and family alike. As Amanda does, Tom moves further away from communal integration with every action he takes. In his closing monologue he summarizes his loneliness as an attempt “to fi nd in motion what was lost in space.” With his portrayal of the Wingfield family, Williams created a masterful psychological profi le of the archetypal outcast. Known for his richly rendered character studies, Williams was also deeply concerned with sociopolitical problems, particularly with the way they shape an individual’s self-perception and limit his or her freedom of expression. Jim expands the fugitive kind model, situating it within a social arena outside the Wingfield apartment. At fi rst, Jim seems to be the quintessential “insider.” A sort of antiTom, Jim is down to earth, personable, and, as his habit of calling Tom “Shakespeare” indicates, suspicious of intellectualism. A high school hero turned corporate lackey, Jim is “an emissary from a world of reality that [the Wingfields] were set apart from.” Yet as Tom, Laura, and Amanda do, Jim feels alienated and dissatisfied. What separates Jim from the other characters is not that he is an insider, but, rather, that he has been seduced by the artificial comforts of conforming. Tom and Jim are foils for each other, each highlighting the

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other’s isolation. On the one hand, Jim accentuates Tom’s inability to fit in at work, where conformism is a way of life. On the other hand, Tom highlights Jim’s inability to chase his dreams. Whereas Tom’s desires estrange him from others, Jim compensates by seeking others’ affi rmation. The audience glimpses a genuine longing in the normally articulate Jim when he fi nds himself at a loss for words to describe his attraction to Laura. Another tragic figure, Jim turns his back on selffulfi llment, living a socially approved but unromantic life with his fiancée. His tragedy is as great as Laura’s, Tom’s, or Amanda’s. To the extent that so many Americans can identify with Jim—his lack of fulfi llment, his resignation to a bland existence—his tragedy may be the greatest of all.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Would you consider yourself a “fugitive kind”? Why or why not? In your experience, is being an outsider a blessing or a curse? 2. The plot of The Glass Menagerie depends on a familiar literary convention: the introduction of a visitor who disrupts the lifestyle of the story’s main characters. Another famous southern writer working at the time, FLANNERY O’CONNOR uses this conceit in many of her stories. Read O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and/or “Good Country People.” Compare and contrast Jim in Menagerie with the Misfit and/ or Manley Pointer in the O’Connor stories. In relation to each story’s plot and theme, what role do these characters play? 3. Although The Glass Menagerie received positive reviews, many critics faulted Williams for using heavy-handed stage devices, such as the legend and the flashing images. Discuss the play’s unconventional set. Do you think it adds to or detracts from the story? 4. Read a Streetcar Named Desire and compare Blanche DuBois with Amanda Wingfield. Both characters are aging southern belles who struggle to cope with a rapidly modernizing world. What are the similarities and differences between their respective environments? How do they react to those environments?

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) A Streetcar Named Desire had its Broadway debut on December 3, 1947. A commercial and critical success, the play ran for 855 performances— Williams’s longest Broadway run—and was the fi rst ever to earn theater’s triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, Donaldson Award, and Drama Critics’ Circle Award. More than half a century later, it has become part of American literary and popular culture. The American Theatre Critics Association voted it the most significant American play of the 20th century; the American Film Institute voted the 1951 Academy Award–winning fi lm adaptation one of the 50 greatest American movies of all time. Set in New Orleans’s Garden District, Streetcar tells the story of Blanche DuBois’s six-month stay with her brother-in-law and pregnant sister, Stanley and Stella Kowalski. After the bank forecloses on the DuBois family’s Mississippi Delta plantation, Blanche moves into the Kowalskis’ two-room apartment. Confined to tight quarters, the refi ned Blanche and coarse Stanley quickly develop an aversion to one another, forcing Stella to mediate their arguments. Mitch, one of Stanley’s poker buddies, falls in love with Blanche but calls off their engagement when Stanley reveals Blanche’s checkered sexual history. The play climaxes on Blanche’s birthday. After Stanley announces Mitch’s change of heart, Stella goes into labor. While Stanley and Stella are at the hospital, Mitch drops by, making a lewd sexual advance toward Blanche, who kicks him out. A few hours later, Stanley returns alone, and a seemingly routine Blanche-Stanley fight climaxes in rape. Unable to bear any more psychological strain, Blanche descends into madness. In the final scene Stella reluctantly agrees to commit Blanche to a psychiatric ward. When Streetcar opened on Broadway, Williams was already considered one of America’s most promising young playwrights. The Glass Menagerie had made him the talk of New York’s theater aficionados. These plays share several recurring character types, themes, and images. Both feature aging southern belles—Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield—in alien environments. Although Blanche lacks artistic talent in the conventional sense, she has an artist’s

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temperament. Until she was fi red for making a sexual advance toward one of her students, she taught highschool English in Laurel and by all accounts retained a lasting love of literature. With a chameleonlike ability to inhabit different roles, she is an artful manipulator. Her temperament, like Tom Wingfield’s, makes her an outcast. Her encroaching madness reflects shades of Laura Wingfield. Yet, as telling as the similarities are, the differences between Williams’s first two big hits reveal even more. With Streetcar Williams returned to exploring sex and violence, two issues he toned down considerably for Menagerie. In retrospect, Williams’s first great success seems an aberration for a writer now remembered for composing some of the 20th century’s most inflammatory dramas. In post–World War II America Streetcar was shocking. At the time domestic abuse and rough language were considered unsuitable for the stage. Even more unthinkable was Williams’s refusal to moralize so-called aberrant sexual behavior. In 1947 such issues were considered inappropriate for public conversation, much less the high art of Broadway. As in many of Williams’s works, character development drives A Streetcar Named Desire. While the story proceeds in chronological time, the incremental revelation of Blanche’s past creates most of the sceneto-scene anticipation. As do Maggie Pollit (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), Lawrence Shannon (Night of the Iguana), and Amanda Wingfield (The Glass Menagerie), Blanche alienates those around her. She is petty, materialistic, insensitive, and offensive. She chides Stella about her impoverished lifestyle and fallen social standing; she considers Stanley “ape-like” and “sub-human.” She is not, however, the story’s villain. In spite of her often-repugnant behavior and commentary, she conveys an inner humanity. She is quintessentially southern, yet her struggles resonate with the general American experience. Even those unfamiliar with southern culture and history can find something of themselves in Blanche’s character. Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles’ Oedipus, Blanche is an icon of her culture, a character type with universal appeal. In Blanche’s character, the conflict between social norms and the individual’s freedom to act according to her desires is on full display. Blanche fancies

herself a lady of refined taste, manners, and values. Having internalized the ideal of southern decorum, she judges and offends those who fail to conform to the ideal. She is also emotionally impoverished and terrified of losing her attractive face and trim figure. Several times during the course of the play, Blanche evades direct light, hoping to obscure both her physical features and emotional pain. Blanche is not blind to the light symbolism. She uses the metaphor to describe her only experience with love: “It was like you suddenly turned a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow.” Although she dodges an intruding headlight while confessing her guilt over her teen husband’s suicide, the “blinding light” shines through her facade, if only temporarily. When Stanley reveals her seamy past, he unwittingly converts her from a conceited snob into a tragic heroine. Stanley’s fault-finding backfires, and audiences recognize that as her age advances, so, too, does her desperation, causing her to seek companionship with men whose desire for her temporarily restores her delicate self-image. Yet, every attempt at restoration takes her further from her goal. With each extramarital affair she betrays the very standards of propriety by which she wants to live. Ironically, in attempting to rebuild an idyllic feminine image, she develops a sordid reputation in Laurel. The most heartrending aspect of Blanche’s predicament is the degree to which she has internalized an unattainable ideal. Her psyche bends under the glare of another’s judgmental gaze; it breaks when she judges herself. And yet, her self-criticism lies buried deep inside her. By the play’s end she has only grown less selfaware; her identity has become inseparable from the standards that make her miserable. Under social and self-induced pressure her psyche ruptures. Certainly, being raped hastens her psychosis; however, her mental breakdown began developing long before she arrived in New Orleans. As the play’s title suggests, desire is a central theme. Through Blanche, Stanley, Stella, and Mitch, Williams explores the thin line separating sexual passion and violence. Blanche yearns for emotional and financial support, as well as a world that conforms to antiquated southern norms. Mitch also wants to forge an emotional connection, but only with some-

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one resembling his mother. As soon as he discovers Blanche’s seedy past, his compassion evaporates, replaced by a dominating will. Love turns to lust, tenderness to brutality. Stanley and Stella have an even stormier relationship. The same passion that makes Stanley physically abusive drives him to despair when Stella momentarily leaves him. For both of them anger, love, and lust originate in the same emotional well. For Williams desire is the cornerstone of human existence; it is what separates humanity from other life-forms. Depending on whether or not it is fulfilled, desire is equally capable of producing unbridled ecstasy and unmitigated anguish. Williams stands in a long line of playwrights, poets, and novelists obsessed with desire’s tragic consequences. From the Greek tragedians to Shakespeare, desire has been synonymous with conflict. Rather than creating an entirely new take on tragedy, Williams contributes a fresh perspective on an ancient theme. Tragedy, roughly defined, demarcates a subgenre of drama featuring a hero whose tragic flaw brings about his or her own demise. According to this definition, Streetcar is textbook tragedy. In Blanche, Williams imagines the consummate tragic hero who possesses a uniquely American flaw: the inability to assimilate into a rapidly modernizing environment. In addition to their fully realized psychological profi les, Blanche and Stanley play symbolic roles. Blanche embodies the southern agrarian ideal, wistfully longing for an idyllic past and mythic landscape that survive only in her mind. Blanche’s idealized world, like the DuBois plantation, Belle Reve, is nothing more than a “beautiful dream.” Elia Kazan, who directed both the Broadway production and the Warner Brothers fi lm, labeled Blanche “the emblem of a dying civilization, making a last curlicued and romantic exit” (“Notebook for a Streetcar Named Desire” 365). Conversely, Stanley represents everything Blanche abhors: the cruel, vulgar, all-too-real industrialized urban landscape. Kazan described him as “the basic animal cynicism of [post–World War II America],” a man whose motto is “Eat, drink, get yours!” (365) Unlike Williams, who considered Blanche and Stanley equally flawed, Kazan envisioned the Blanche-Stanley relationship along a

good/evil axis. Their differences notwithstanding, Kazan and Williams were convinced that Blanche and Stanley stood for incompatible world orders. That Blanche’s world was fated to lose from the outset is implied by symbols on her journey: After leaving Belle Reve, Blanche travels on a “street-car named Desire,” transfers “to one called Cemeteries,” and gets off at “Elysian Fields!” In her first lines, Blanche reveals her trajectory. Fueled by desire, she is expelled from a beautiful dream only to arrive at death’s door, seeking passage to an afterlife reserved for antiquity’s virtuous and brave. The grotesquely ominous foreshadowing draws us into Blanche’s strange mixture of realism and fantasy, where her struggles with Stanley herald an ever-escalating battle between old and new, kindness and cruelty, imagination and reality, all lurking underneath the promise of the American dream. Williams portrays this dream, as the Kowalskis’ rundown apartment complex, as an ironic ruse that traps us within invisible bubbles, rules out hope for community, and precludes human kindness.

For Discussion or Writing 1. When used to describe a piece of literature, tone signifies the quality or characteristics of a writer’s work that reveal his or her presuppositions and attitudes. What is the tone of Blanche’s fi nal line, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”? 2. Under pressure from the Motion Picture Association of America and the Catholic Legion of Decency, the Academy Award–winning 1951 fi lm adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire censored the script in two important ways. First, it excluded all references to homosexuality in scene 6. Second, it eliminated the implied rape in scene 10. After reviewing the script and watching the fi lm (paying close attention to these two scenes), discuss the impact of the changes. Why do you think the film’s Hollywood producers cut out these details? Does the film work as well without them? If you did not know that Blanche’s husband, Allan Grey, was gay, would his suicide make sense? Given that Blanche blames herself for his death, does her descent into madness fit? Without knowing

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Stanley raped her, would you find her madness in scene 11 believable? 3. Williams is famous for exploring gender roles in mid-20th-century America. With this in mind, how does A Streetcar Named Desire portray differences between men and women? Are those differences based on genetic or cultural factors? Why do you think it is all right for Stanley to consume alcohol openly with his friends while Blanche must hide and/or feel ashamed of her drinking? 4. Philip Kolin interprets the poles Stanley and Blanche inhabit as an embodiment of Williams’s “androgynous nature. Like Blanche, Williams saw himself as the fugitive artist, a victim of rejection and hysteria. . . . Yet Williams was also present in Blanche’s executioner, Stanley Kowalski,” whose sexual appetite Williams recognized in himself and “the rough homosexual trade [he] was accustomed to in the 1940s”. How is Williams’s internal strife like Blanche’s? Compared with Blanche, how is Williams’s inner turmoil influenced by external social forces? 5. The years between 1945 and 1960 make up one of America’s most conservative periods, especially concerning sexuality. With his envelope-pushing plays, Williams is often credited with normalizing the portrayal and discussion of sexuality in American theater. For the most part, however, the characters who resist accepting traditional sexual norms wind up lonely, frustrated, and disturbed. This is particularly true of Williams’s gay characters. How does American society deal with sexuality differently now than it did in 1947, when Streetcar was first produced? What similarities between then and now do you see? Consider comparing the play to a more contemporary film or novel that examines sexuality, such as Brokeback Mountain.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) Garnering Williams a second Pulitzer Prize and a third Drama Critics’ Circle Award, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened at New York’s Morosco Theatre on March 24, 1955. In spite of bad press—several

reviewers condemned the play’s sexually explicit content and coarse language—and Williams’s disappointment with Elia Kazan’s directorial vision and script revisions, the Broadway production ran for more than 600 performances. In 1958 the play was adapted for the screen under Richard Brooks’s direction and stared Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, and Burl Ives in the lead roles. With its crackling dialogue and piercing psychological insights, especially in Acts 1 and 2, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof presents Williams at the height of his powers. Although it captures life in a particular time and place, many of its themes are still relevant today: the complexity of sexuality, the consequences of living a double standard in a judgmental world, the tragic origins and outcomes of substance abuse, and finally, the universality of human dignity. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof examines the relationships forged by three generations of Pollitts, as they compete for ownership of the family estate. Set in a bedroom of Big Daddy Pollitt’s plantation home, the action takes place on a summer evening in the Mississippi Delta. When the curtain rises, the family (the patriarch, Big Daddy, his wife, Big Mama; their younger son, Brick, and his wife, Maggie; their older son, Gooper, and his pregnant wife, Mae; and their five children) has gathered for Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. As the story unfolds, we learn that Big Daddy has terminal cancer; that Maggie, Gooper, and Mae are angling for the family riches; and that Brick’s indifference, alcoholism, and refusal to share Maggie’s bed, much less conceive a child with her, threaten their chances of receiving an inheritance. After several onstage arguments, including one in which Maggie falsely claims to be pregnant, the play concludes as Brick agrees to “make the lie true.” With just enough of a plot to propel the action forward, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is classic Williams: character driven, psychologically realistic, and rich in symbols. Having broken his ankle the night before, Brick is confined to the bedroom, hobbling back and forth in a ceaseless attempt to avoid interaction. A doubly wounded man, Brick needs a crutch to support his body and a bottle of whiskey to buoy his psyche. His greatest crutch, however, is his aloof personality. As his name and personality suggest, he

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erects psychological brick walls, emotionally blocking out his wife and family. Ironically, the action revolves around Brick in spite of his repeated attempts to remove himself from view. The only character who figures prominently in all three acts, Brick holds together the play’s structure in the same way the plantation holds together the Pollitt family. In his Memoirs Williams claims that of all his major works, he liked Cat best. Adhering to Aristotle’s rule that “a tragedy must have unity of time and place and magnitude of theme,” Williams considered Cat “both a work of art and a work of craft” (168). Of his major plays Cat is the most tightly structured. Confined to a single, unchanged setting and proceeding seamlessly from beginning to end, the play diverges from the episodic structure Williams had used in his major pre-1955 scripts. His experimentation with classical rules for portraying time and space on the stage did not, however, prevent him from adding a few personal signatures. Whereas classical drama is plot driven, Williams presents a characterpropelled story. Also characteristic of Williams’s other plays—particularly The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire—Cat follows Williams’s knack for creating stand-alone vignettes: Acts 1 and 2, for example, could work as miniplays staged on their own. Unlike in his earlier plays, however, Williams used real-time staging, limiting the passage of time to the action on the stage. Of the four major prize-winning plays Williams composed, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the only one lacking a clear-cut hero. While several critics have argued that Blanche and Stanley in Streetcar and Shannon, Maxine, and Hannah in Night of the Iguana are the central characters, most find Blanche and Shannon to be their stories’ protagonists. With Cat, however, it is more difficult to isolate a protagonist. Both Maggie and Big Daddy spend too much time offstage to warrant serious consideration. Brick is physically present throughout, but he is often withdrawn from the conversation and from the audience’s view. Brick threads the play together by linking narratives and characters, but he often seems more a moving prop than a hero. Although technically a protracted dialogue between Maggie and Brick, Act 1 often seems more

Maggie’s monologue. The first third of the play is her show. The actress portraying her must summon all her talents in order to cycle through the kaleidoscopic array of emotions Maggie experiences in the first act. By turns vibrant, witty, spiteful, greedy, insightful, and caring, Maggie is both nauseating and charismatic. Though she sometimes appears to be interested only in the Pollitt family riches, she loves Brick intensely, even if she has expressed her desires in socially unacceptable ways. During the first act’s climactic exchange, when they fi nally divulge the cause of their caustic relationship, Maggie cries, “[Skipper and I] made love to each other to dream it was you, both of us! Yes, yes, yes! Truth, truth!” Incapable of recognizing Maggie’s sincerity, Brick sees only that she has broken an entrenched social covenant, not only by having an extramarital affair but also by sleeping with his best friend (perhaps even his true love). Maggie, on the brink of tears, professes genuine love for Brick, but, as with many of Williams’s characters, her departure from conventional sexual norms alienates her. Act 1 introduces several important issues and themes that appear throughout the play. Brick and Maggie litter their conversation with sports metaphors, highlighting the competition upon which their marriage is based. Maggie, whose self-applied nickname, Maggie the Cat, sounds like a football mascot, copes with Brick’s despondency by pushing their disputes to the verge of conflict, hoping to draw Brick out and force him to make concessions. Brick’s refusal to respond to Maggie’s persistent adulation and cajolery makes her feel like a “cat on a hot tin roof.” This metaphor, as does everything else they discuss, means something different to each of them. For Maggie it signifies entrapment. No matter what she says or how she says it, Brick will never give her a second chance. For Brick, who considers Maggie’s self-pity banal and exaggerated, cats on hot tin roofs can always jump off or, in Maggie’s case, find sexual fulfillment elsewhere. In Act 2, Maggie cedes the spotlight to Big Daddy, a man so domineering that his doctor is afraid to show him the lab results confirming terminal cancer. Act 2 also presents a second marriage, which, when compared to Maggie and Brick’s, broadens

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the play’s insight into southern patriarchal relations. We are given much less access to Big Mama and Big Daddy’s marriage, although we see enough to recognize its unbalanced and unhealthy structure. Big Daddy is verbally abusive and misogynistic. At one point he tells Brick that his clean bill of health makes him want to hire a prostitute, “strip her naked and smother her in minks and choke her with diamonds.” Brick’s apathy and lack of sex drive are matched only by Big Daddy’s stridence and violent lust. Maggie and Big Mama are also polar opposites. Maggie is articulate and “well-bred,” whereas Big Mama is the opposite of the archetypal well-mannered southern gentlewoman. In spite of the different individual personalities involved, the two marriages are strikingly similar. Both men say they are disgusted with their wives’ “mendacious” habits. Brick “can’t stand” Maggie, and Big Daddy’s conversations with Big Mama are spiteful and cruel. Each marriage maintains a facade of functionality and happiness, yet devoid of tolerance and respect, neither allows intimacy and understanding. Acts 1 and 2 bear nearly identical structures. Each portrays a conversation between Brick and another character, who dominates the conversation. Each ends with its own self-contained climax. In Act 2, Big Daddy does most of the talking. Although their discussion takes several seemingly aimless turns, Big Daddy returns to two subjects: Brick’s reasons for drinking and the overall difficulty of genuine communication. Finally, Brick justifies his drinking as a means of withdrawing from a world of “mendacity.” Big Daddy rebuffs Brick’s generalization as “ninetyproof bull,” suggesting that Brick is lying to himself. When Big Daddy spurns Brick’s explanation, he inadvertently identifies the self-loathing that defines Brick’s persona. Brick hates the lying (“mendacious”) nature of human interaction, and yet he offers a vague generality about mendacity rather than admitting the truth about his drinking, a habit to which he turns in order to purge his guilt over Skipper’s death. After several subtle hints, Williams finally exposes the link between mendacity and self-loathing in the second act’s climactic sequence. Whether or not Brick is gay, a detail Williams leaves unresolved, it is clear Brick has been dishonest with both himself and oth-

ers about his sexuality. Because he has internalized a southern moral code, Brick’s homophobia runs deep; he disowned his best friend because of it and now spends each day forcing his mind to “click” off, hoping to avoid any disturbing self-revelations. The third act builds on the first two, confirming mendacity as the play’s thematic glue. As Big Daddy raves offstage about the liars who made him believe he was healthy, thereby symbolically taking his life, the rest of the family gathers to compete over the terms of his will. Suddenly, in a desperate attempt to secure the plantation for herself and Brick, Maggie announces the play’s most ostentatious lie: She is pregnant with Brick’s child. As the curtain closes with Brick reluctantly agreeing to help Maggie conceive, interpretive possibilities abound. Is lying necessary to maintain functional human relationships, as Maggie’s big lie seems to do for her marriage? Or, is it a fatal social disease, as Big Daddy claims? Rather than answering these questions, Williams leaves it up to each audience member to pass judgment. As does the complex social world depicted on stage, in which each individual character reaches a different, if dissatisfying conclusion about lies and the liars who tell them, our own experiences with truth, half-truth, and untruth color the way we cope in a mendacious world.

For Discussion or Writing 1. Although Williams never approved of Kazan’s changes to Cat’s script for the Broadway production, Williams’s respect for Kazan’s vision led him to rewrite Act 3 for the stage. Since then, the play has always been published with two versions of the last act. After reading both versions, discuss their differences. Which version is more plausible? Which version is more consistent with the fi rst two acts? Brick undergoes a more pronounced transformation in the Broadway version. How likely is he to change so much after one conversation with his father? 2. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof features several recurring motifs, metaphors, and symbols—for example, cat/cattiness, sports/competition, and crutches. Choose one (not necessarily from this list), and discuss its meaning within the play’s context.

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3. Mendacity is an important word in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. What do you think Williams is trying to say about the role lying plays in our culture? Is lying sometimes necessary, or is it always wrong? Why? 4. Both Skipper and Allan Gray in A Streetcar Named Desire (especially in Scene 6) are absent gay men who wilted once subjected to homophobia. Now dead, each character haunts his respective story, playing a large role in key characters’ decisions, motivations, and emotional stability. Compare and contrast these men. Which is more rounded? What impact does each man have on the characters haunted by his memory? 5. Compare and contrast the set (what is actually on the stage) of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with that in A Streetcar Named Desire. Now compare the settings (the place the set is supposed to represent). Are there similarities between the Delta plantation bedroom and the two-room Elysian Fields apartment? How about between the mythical Belle Reve and the Pollitt home?

The Night of the Iguana (1961) The Night of the Iguana was Williams’s last great critical and commercial success. The play debuted at Broadway’s Royal Theatre on December 28, 1961, running for 316 performances and earning Williams his fourth Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Beginning as a short story Williams sketched in 1940 while staying at the Hotel Costa Verde outside Acapulco, Mexico, the play evolved over a 20-year period. Although the final script bore little resemblance to the early drafts, Williams retained the locale and time that inspired the story. Set during the fi rst stages of World War II, Iguana explores individual desperation in one of history’s most anxious periods. Located across the ocean from the war’s European theater, the story reminds us that human anguish arises not only out of grave but also out of banal circumstances. The story centers on Dr. Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked Episcopalian-priest-turned-low-rentvacation-tour-guide. Leading a group of schoolteachers from an all-female Baptist school in rural Texas,

Shannon abandons the itinerary midway through the trip, hoping to recuperate from physical and psychological exhaustion. The action picks up when the bewildered Shannon staggers into the Costa Verde Hotel outside Puerto Barrio, Mexico, where he knows the proprietor, Maxine Faulk. After discovering Maxine’s husband has recently died, Shannon confesses to having slept with Charlotte Goodall, a 16-year-old student tagging along with the teachers. By the time Shannon arrives on Maxine’s verandah, he has become the target of the trip leader Judith Fellowes’s vitriol and the subject of the teachers’ gossip. “At the end of his rope,” Shannon confiscates the bus key and forces the women to stay at the Costa Verde. During the confusion, Hannah Jelkes emerges from the jungle with her wheelchair-bound 97-yearold grandfather, Jonathan Coffi n (Nono), a semifamous minor poet. Immediately attracted to Hannah, Shannon convinces Maxine to take them in despite their inability to pay. That evening, after rebuffing Charlotte’s marriage overtures and changing into his clerical outfit to demonstrate his piety, Shannon strikes up a conversation with Hannah, who sketches him as he discusses the church’s reasons for barring him from his own parish (fornication and heresy). An alternate tour conductor arrives, fires Shannon, forcibly takes the ignition key, and leads the ladies back to the bus. Sensing her victory, Miss Fellowes admonishes Shannon a final time. The completeness of his failure sinking in—“there’s nothing lower than Blake Tours”—Shannon grows hysterical, prompting Maxine to have him tied down in a hammock as a precautionary measure. While bound, he has another profound conversation with Hannah, who diagnoses Shannon’s problem as “the oldest one in the world—the need to believe in something or in someone—almost anyone—almost anything . . . something.” Finally, Shannon frees himself. After Hannah rebuffs his sexual advances, he commits a last gesture of goodwill, freeing an iguana that has been tied to a cactus for the duration of the play. Upon the creature’s release, Nono completes his final poem. The play concludes on a bittersweet note. Shannon agrees to help Maxine manage the hotel, thereby releasing him from his spiritual and religious bonds. As they walk to the beach for a night swim

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in the “liquid moonlight,” Nono gently dies, leaving Hannah completely alone. A turning point in Williams’s career, The Night of the Iguana both affirms and departs from his earlier work. All three central figures—Shannon, Maxine, and Hannah—are outsiders who, despite weakness and repulsive conduct, have an inner humanity that redeems them. As are many of Williams’s characters, most notably Blanche Dubois (in A Streetcar Named Desire), Shannon is pulled between spiritual fulfi llment and carnal desire. The quest for freedom, particularly freedom from constrictive sexual norms, drives Shannon’s nervous breakdown and selfcentered behavior. Yet, the play diverges from Williams’s earlier work by closing on an optimistic note. Although the play ends with a death, Nono fi nishes his poem prior to dying, thereby experiencing a dual release, the first from the agony of artistic creation, the second from age-induced pain and dementia. By agreeing to stay with the lusty Maxine, Shannon frees himself from his religious guilt. As does the iguana, “one of God’s creatures at the end of the rope,” Nono and Shannon find liberation from the ropes that bind them. Hannah’s loneliness is initially disturbing, but if we understand her as a symbol of the spiritual life, one devoid of physical human contact, her isolation is Shannon’s gain—and presumably our own. In an interview Williams gave the year after Iguana premiered, he claimed he sought to show “how to live beyond despair and still live” (Funke and Booth 72). The play’s timing was appropriate. His relationship with Frank Merlo in shambles, his career jeopardized by protests and claims of indecency, Williams used Iguana to work through his own despair. He also used the play to respond to critics who found his works unsavory. Hannah’s line “I don’t judge people, I draw them” seems aimed both at Shannon’s and at Williams’s detractors. Williams remained adamant that art ought to expose humanity’s seedier side, rather than glossing over it or imagining it out of existence. Shannon offers an impassioned plea for understanding on the same grounds. In his final confrontation with Miss Fellowes, Shannon justifies his sexual improprieties in the same way Williams might justify his art: “I haven’t stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I’ve always allowed the ones that

were willing to see, to see!—the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none of them will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!” Whether it was Stanley Kowalski’s New Orleans apartment in A Streetcar Named Desire or Jabe Torrance’s rural Mississippi dry goods store in Orpheus Descending, Williams guided audiences “willing to see” through some of the most colorful and disturbing “underworlds” ever staged in American theaters. In the process of bringing these locales to life, Williams revealed the most colorful and disturbing underworld of all: the human psyche.

For Discussion or Writing 1. While staying at the Hotel Costa Verde in 1940, Williams reportedly met Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, novelist, and playwright. Both men were fascinated by human desperation and the desire for freedom. Read Sartre’s play No Exit and compare it with The Night of the Iguana. Do you think Williams would agree with Sartre’s famous line “Hell is other people”? 2. Many critics have noted the symbolic overtones of the play’s two central female characters, Hannah and Maxine, who they argue represent Shannon’s pull toward the spiritual (Hannah) and the carnal (Maxine). Are these symbolic representations accurate? If so, does Williams reduce these women to objects, mere instruments for a man’s psychic recovery? 3. Discuss Shannon’s assessment that we “live on two levels. . . , the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really.” What does he mean by “fantastic” and “realistic”? What do you make of Hannah’s reply, that the fantastic and realistic levels are equally “real”? How is the play itself simultaneously fantastic and realistic?

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON WILLIAMS AND HIS WORK 1. Although most students fi rst read Williams’s plays, they were meant to be performed. If

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possible, attend a live production of the play(s) you are studying, or view the fi lm adaptation— all of Williams’s most famous works have been made into movies. How did the performance change your understanding of the play? What did you notice in the script that you missed while watching the production, and vice versa? 2. Williams named most of his plays after a key symbol in the story. For the play(s) you are studying, discuss the title’s meaning. What does the title represent, both literally and figuratively? 3. Tennessee Williams is often listed alongside William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, TRUMAN CAPOTE, and Carson McCullers as a southern gothic writer. The southern gothic style developed in the early and mid-20th century. Southern gothic writers tend to create grotesque, alienated characters whose physical and/or psychological abnormalities, sexual proclivities, or violent temperaments alienate them from each other and society. Often alienation results from a clash between a mythic and idealized southern past and a modern present. Discuss a character and/or scene of one of Williams’s plays that typifies the southern gothic tradition. Then, compare Williams with another southern gothic writer. What similarities do you recognize? What differences? 4. Throughout his career Williams struggled with censorship. The Boston City Council threatened to shut down production of Battle of Angels in 1940 unless several “offensive” lines were removed. Ten years later Hollywood’s regulatory commission, the Motion Picture Code, demanded elimination of the rape scene and all mention of homosexuality in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ran into similar problems. Perhaps Williams’s major battle with censorship took place over his original 1956 screenplay, Baby Doll. The then-powerful Catholic Legion of Decency condemned the film; Francis Cardinal Spellman, though he had not seen the movie, called it “revolting . . . a contemptuous defiance of the natural law . . . immoral and corrupting . . . evil in concept. I exhort Catholic people from patronizing this film under pain of sin. . . . Since

these degrading and immoral pictures stimulate immorality and crime they must be condemned” (quoted in Spoto 210). Choose one of Williams’s plays and research its history with censorship. Was the censorship justified? Why or why not? Does the presentation of “immoral” behavior in art (theater, film, painting) cause viewers (or listeners) to behave immorally? Is censorship ever justified? On what grounds? 5. With the exception of The Glass Menagerie, all of Williams’s critically acclaimed works deal explicitly with human sexuality. Many feature characters whose sexual preferences or habits thrust them out of the mainstream and precipitate moral judgment from other characters and/or the audience. Why do sexual issues and situations invite such strong responses? Should sexuality be considered a moral issue? 6. In an essay on the theater Williams writes, “In my opinion art is a kind of anarchy, and the theater is a province of art. . . . It runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized society apparently must be based. It is a benevolent anarchy: it must be that and if it is true art, it is. It is benevolent in the sense of constructing something which is missing, and what it constructs may be merely criticism of things as they exist” (Where I Live 8). Choose one play and discuss the “missing” element it constructs. What problem is the work exploring? Does the play suggest a solution to that problem? 7. Critics have called Williams an expressionist, a symbolist, and a realist. These literary movements, however, are usually defined in opposition to one another. Research and defi ne realism, expressionism, and symbolism. Are these categories useful for understanding Williams’s work? How would you classify the play(s) you have read? WORKS CITED AND ADDITIONAL R ESOURCES Adler, Thomas. A Streetcar Named Desire: The Moth and the Lantern. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Bigsy, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to TwentiethCentury American Drama. Vol. 2: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

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Bloom, Harold, ed. Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Costello, Donald. “Tennessee Williams’ Fugitive Kind.” Modern Drama 15 (1972): 26–43. Crandell, George W. Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. Devlin, Albert J., ed. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Downer, Alan S., ed. American Drama and Its Critics: A Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Funke, Lewis, and John E. Booth. “Williams on Williams.” Theatre Arts 46 (January 1962): 16–19, 22–23. Griffin, Alice. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Gross, Robert F., ed. Tennessee Williams: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2002. Gunn, Drewey Wayne. Tennessee Williams: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1991. Kolin, Philip C., ed. Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. ———. The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2004. Krasner, David, ed. A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. Leverich, Lyle. Tenn: The Timeless World of Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown, 1997. ———. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown, 1995. Londré, Felicia Hardison. Tennessee Williams. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. Martin, Robert A., ed. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. McDonough, Carla J. Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997. Murphy, Brenda. Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. “MWP: Tennessee Williams.” The Mississippi Writers Page. Available online. URL: http://www.olemiss. edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/williams_ tennessee/. Accessed May 21, 2007.

Paller, Michael. Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Broadway Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Rasky, Harry. Tennessee Williams: A Portrait in Laughter and Lamentation. Niagara Falls, N.Y.: Mosaic Press, 2000. Reuben, Paul P. “Chapter 8: Tennessee Williams.” PAL: Perspectives in American Literature—a Research and Reference Guide. Available online. URL: http:// web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap8/ williams.html. Accessed May 21, 2007. Roudané, Mathew C., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Schlueter, June. Modern American Drama: The Female Canon. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Stanton, Stephen S., ed. Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977. Summers, Claude, J. Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall: Studies in a Male Homosexual Literary Tradition. New York: Continuum, 1990. Tharpe, Jac, ed. Tennessee Williams: A Tribute. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977. Tischler, Nancy M. Student Companion to Tennessee Williams. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Weales, Gerald. The Jumping-Off Place: American Drama in the 1960’s. New York: Macmillan, 1969. ———. Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Williams, Edwina Dakin. Remember Me to Tom. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963. Williams, Tennessee. Collected Stories. New York: New Directions, 1985. ———. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1975. ———. Plays: 1937–1955. New York: Library of America, 2000. ———. Plays: 1957–1980. New York: Library of America, 2000. ———. Where I Live: Selected Essays. Edited by Christine R. Day and Bob Woods. New York: New Directions, 1978.

J. Earen Rast

Appendix I Alphabetical List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers

Adams, Henry Adams, John, and Abigail Adams Albee, Edward Alcott, Louisa May Alvarez, Julia Anaya, Rudolfo Anderson, Sherwood Angelou, Maya Baca, Jimmy Santiago Baldwin, James Bambara, Toni Cade Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones) Bellow, Saul Bierce, Ambrose Bishop, Elizabeth Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Ša) Bradbury, Ray Bradford, William Bradstreet, Anne Brooks, Gwendolyn Brown, Charles Brockden Bryant, William Cullen Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez Capote, Truman Carver, Raymond Cather, Willa Champlain, Samuel de Cheever, John Chesnutt, Charles Child, Lydia Maria Chopin, Kate Cisneros, Sandra Cofer, Judith Ortiz

1838–1918 1735–1826 1744–1818 1928– 1832–1888 1950– 1937– 1876–1942 1928– 1952– 1924–1987 1939– 1934–

Volume 2 Volume 1 Volume 4 Volume 2 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 3 Volume 5 Volume 5 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 5

1915–2005 1842–1914? 1911–1979 1876–1938

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4 2 4 3

1920– 1590–1657 1612–1672 1917–2000 1771–1810 1794–1878 1490–1556

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4 1 1 4 1 1 1

1924–1984 1938–1988 1873–1947 1570–1635 1912–1982 1858–1932 1802–1880 1850–1904 1954– 1952–

Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 3 Volume 1 Volume 4 Volume 2 Volume 2 Volume 2 Volume 5 Volume 5

Collins, Billy Columbus, Christopher Cooper, James Fenimore Crane, Hart Crane, Stephen Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de Cullen, Countee Cummings, E. E. Davis, Rebecca Harding Dickinson, Emily Dos Passos, John Douglass, Frederick Dove, Rita Dreiser, Theodore DuBois, W. E. B. Dunbar, Paul Laurence Edwards, Jonathan Eliot, T. S. Ellison, Ralph Emerson, Ralph Waldo Equiano, Olaudah Erdrich, Louise Faulkner, William Ferlinghetti, Lawrence Fern, Fanny (Sara Willis Parton) Fitzgerald, F. Scott Forché, Carolyn Foster, Hannah Webster Franklin, Benjamin Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freneau, Philip Morin Frost, Robert Fuller, Margaret Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

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1941– 1451–1506 1789–1851 1899–1932 1871–1900 1735–1813

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

5 1 1 3 2 1

1903–1946 1894–1962 1831–1910 1830–1886 1896–1970 1818–1895 1952– 1871–1945 1868–1963 1872–1906 1703–1758 1888–1965 1914–1994 1803–1882 1745–1797 1954– 1897–1962 1920– 1811–1872

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3 3 2 2 3 2 5 3 3 2 1 3 4 2 1 5 3 4 2

1896–1940 1950– 1758–1840 1706–1790 1852–1930

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3 5 1 1 2

1752–1832 1874–1963 1810–1850 1860–1935

Volume Volume Volume Volume

1 3 2 2

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Ginsberg, Allen Giovanni, Nikki H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Haley, Alex Hammon, Jupiter Handsome Lake Hansberry, Lorraine Harjo, Joy Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harris, Joel Chandler Harte, Bret Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hayden, Robert Heller, Joseph Hemingway, Ernest Howells, William Dean Hughes, Langston Hurston, Zora Neale Irving, Washington Jackson, Shirley Jacobs, Harriet James, Henry Jarrell, Randall Jefferson, Thomas Jewett, Sarah Orne Kerouac, Jack Kesey, Ken King, Martin Luther, Jr. Kingsolver, Barbara Kingston, Maxine Hong Knowles, John Komunyakaa, Yusef Larsen, Nella Lee, Chang-rae Lee, Harper Levertov, Denise London, Jack Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Lowell, Robert Malamud, Bernard Malcolm X Marshall, Paule Mather, Cotton

1926–1997 1943– 1886–1961 1921–1992 1711–1806 1735–1815 1930–1965 1951– 1825–1911

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4 5 3 4 1 1 4 5 2

1848–1908 1836–1902 1804–1864 1913–1980 1923–1999 1899–1961 1837–1920 1871–1967 1891–1960 1783–1859 1919–1965 1813–1897 1843–1916 1914–1965 1743–1826 1849–1909 1922–1969 1935–2001 1929–1968 1955– 1940– 1926–2001 1947– 1891–1964 1965– 1926– 1923–1997 1876–1916 1807–1882

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2 2 2 4 4 3 2 3 3 1 4 2 2 4 1 2 4 4 4 5 5 4 5 3 5 4 4 3 2

1917–1977 1914–1986 1925–1965 1929– 1663–1728

Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

4 4 4 4 1

McCarthy, Cormac McKay, Claude McMurtry, Larry Melville, Herman Millay, Edna St. Vincent Miller, Arthur Momaday, N. Scott Moore, Marianne Mora, Pat Morrison, Toni Morton, Thomas Murray, Judith Sargent Oates, Joyce Carol O’Brien, Tim Occom, Samson O’Connor, Flannery Oliver, Mary O’Neill, Eugene Ortiz, Simon J. Paine, Thomas Piatt, Sarah M. B. Pinsky, Robert Plath, Sylvia Poe, Edgar Allan Porter, Katherine Anne Potok, Chaim Pound, Ezra Rand, Ayn Reed, Ishmael Rich, Adrienne Robinson, Edwin Arlington Roethke, Theodore Roth, Philip Rowson, Susanna Haswell Salinger, J. D. Sandburg, Carl Sedgwick, Catharine Maria Sexton, Anne Silko, Leslie Marmon Smith, John Snyder, Gary Soto, Gary

1933– 1890–1948 1936– 1819–1891 1892–1950 1915–2005 1934– 1887–1972 1942– 1931– 1579–1647 1751–1820 1938– 1946– 1723–1792 1925–1964 1935– 1888–1953 1941– 1737–1809 1836–1919 1940– 1932–1963 1809–1849 1890–1980 1929–2002 1885–1972 1905–1982 1938– 1929– 1869–1935

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1908–1963 1933– 1762–1824

Volume 4 Volume 4 Volume 1

1919–2010 1878–1967 1789–1867

Volume 4 Volume 3 Volume 1

1928–1974 1948– 1580–1631 1930– 1952–

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4 5 1 5 5

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Stein, Gertrude Steinbeck, John Stevens, Wallace Stowe, Harriet Beecher Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) Swenson, May Tan, Amy Taylor, Edward Thoreau, Henry David Toomer, Jean Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Updike, John Viramontes, Helena María Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.

1874–1946 1902–1968 1879–1955 1811–1896 1865–1914

Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 3 Volume 2 Volume 3

1913–1989 1952– ca. 1642–1729 1817–1862 1894–1967 1835–1910

Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 2

1932–2009 1954– 1922–2007

Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 4

Walker, Alice Warren, Robert Penn Washington, Booker T. Welty, Eudora Wharton, Edith Wheatley, Phillis Whitman, Walt Wilbur, Richard Wilder, Thornton Williams, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Wilson, August Wilson, Harriet E. Winthrop, John Wright, Richard

1944– 1905–1989 1856–1915 1909–2001 1862–1937 1753–1784 1819–1892 1921– 1897–1975 1911–1983 1883–1961 1945–2005 1825–1900 1588–1649 1908–1960

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Appendix II Chronological List of Writers Included in All Volumes of the Student’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers, by Birth Date Note that authors are placed in the volume that covers the period during which they published their most important works. Some authors published their works relatively early or relatively late in their lives. This explains why, for example, certain authors placed in volume 3 were actually born before certain authors placed in volume 2.

Christopher Columbus Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca Samuel de Champlain Thomas Morton John Smith John Winthrop William Bradford Anne Bradstreet Edward Taylor Cotton Mather Jonathan Edwards Benjamin Franklin Jupiter Hammon Samson Occom J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur Handsome Lake John Adams Thomas Paine Thomas Jefferson Abigail Adams Olaudah Equiano Judith Sargent Murray Philip Morin Freneau Phillis Wheatley Hannah Webster Foster Susanna Haswell Rowson Charles Brockden Brown Washington Irving James Fenimore Cooper Catharine Maria Sedgwick

1451–1506 1490–1556

Volume 1 Volume 1

1570–1635 1579–1647 1580–1631 1588–1649 1590–1657 1612–1672 ca. 1642–1729 1663–1728 1703–1758 1706–1790 1711–1806 1723–1792 1735–1813

Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1

1735–1815 1735–1826 1737–1809 1743–1826 1744–1818 1745–1797 1751–1820 1752–1832 1753–1784 1758–1840 1762–1824 1771–1810 1783–1859 1789–1851 1789–1867

Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1 Volume 1

William Cullen Bryant Lydia Maria Child Ralph Waldo Emerson Nathaniel Hawthorne Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Edgar Allan Poe Margaret Fuller Fanny Fern (Sara Willis Parton) Harriet Beecher Stowe Harriet Jacobs Henry David Thoreau Frederick Douglass Herman Melville Walt Whitman Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Harriet E. Wilson Emily Dickinson Rebecca Harding Davis Louisa May Alcott Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Bret Harte Sarah M. B. Piatt William Dean Howells Henry Adams Ambrose Bierce Henry James Joel Chandler Harris Sarah Orne Jewett

579

1794–1878 1802–1880 1803–1882 1804–1864 1807–1882

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1 2 2 2 2

1809–1849 1810–1850 1811–1872

Volume 2 Volume 2 Volume 2

1811–1896 1813–1897 1817–1862 1818–1895 1819–1891 1819–1892 1825–1911

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2 2 2 2 2 2 2

1825–1900 1830–1886 1831–1910 1832–1888 1835–1910

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2 2 2 2 2

1836–1902 1836–1919 1837–1920 1838–1918 1842–1914? 1843–1916 1848–1908 1849–1909

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2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

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Kate Chopin Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman Booker T. Washington Charles Chesnutt Charlotte Perkins Gilman Edith Wharton Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) W. E. B. DuBois Edwin Arlington Robinson Stephen Crane Theodore Dreiser Langston Hughes Paul Laurence Dunbar Willa Cather Gertrude Stein Robert Frost Jack London Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) Sherwood Anderson Carl Sandburg Wallace Stevens William Carlos Williams Ezra Pound H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Marianne Moore Eugene O’Neill T. S. Eliot Claude McKay Katherine Anne Porter Zora Neale Hurston Nella Larsen Edna St. Vincent Millay E. E. Cummings Jean Toomer F. Scott Fitzgerald John Dos Passos William Faulkner Thornton Wilder Hart Crane Ernest Hemingway John Steinbeck

1850–1904 1852–1930

Volume 2 Volume 2

1856–1915 1858–1932 1860–1935 1862–1937 1865–1914

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1868–1963 1869–1935

Volume 3 Volume 3

1871–1900 1871–1945 1871–1967 1872–1906 1873–1947 1874–1946 1874–1963 1876–1916 1876–1938

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1876–1942 1878–1967 1879–1955 1883–1961 1885–1972 1886–1961 1887–1972 1888–1953 1888–1965 1890–1948 1890–1980 1891–1960 1891–1964 1892–1950 1894–1962 1894–1967 1896–1940 1896–1970 1897–1962 1897–1975 1899–1932 1899–1961 1902–1968

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Countee Cullen Ayn Rand Robert Penn Warren Richard Wright Theodore Roethke Eudora Welty Elizabeth Bishop Tennessee Williams John Cheever Robert Hayden May Swenson Randall Jarrell Bernard Malamud Ralph Ellison Saul Bellow Arthur Miller Robert Lowell Gwendolyn Brooks Shirley Jackson J. D. Salinger Ray Bradbury Lawrence Ferlinghetti Richard Wilbur Alex Haley Jack Kerouac Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Denise Levertov Joseph Heller James Baldwin Truman Capote Flannery O’Connor Malcolm X Harper Lee Allen Ginsberg John Knowles Edward Albee Maya Angelou Anne Sexton Paule Marshall Adrienne Rich Martin Luther King, Jr. Chaim Potok Gary Snyder Lorraine Hansberry Toni Morrison

1903–1946 1905–1982 1905–1989 1908–1960 1908–1963 1909–2001 1911–1979 1911–1983 1912–1982 1913–1980 1913–1989 1914–1965 1914–1986 1914–1994 1915–2005 1915–2005 1917–1977 1917–2000 1919–1965 1919–2010 1920– 1920– 1921– 1921–1992 1922–1969 1922–2007 1923–1997 1923–1999 1924–1987 1924–1984 1925–1964 1925–1965 1926– 1926–1997 1926–2001 1928– 1928– 1928–1974 1929– 1929– 1929–1968 1929–2002 1930– 1930–1965 1931–

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Sylvia Plath John Updike Cormac McCarthy Philip Roth N. Scott Momaday Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) Mary Oliver Ken Kesey Larry McMurtry Rudolfo Anaya Joyce Carol Oates Ishmael Reed Raymond Carver Toni Cade Bambara Maxine Hong Kingston Robert Pinsky Billy Collins Simon J. Ortiz Pat Mora

1932–1963 1932–2009 1933– 1933– 1934– 1934– 1935– 1935–2001 1936– 1937– 1938– 1938– 1938–1988 1939– 1940– 1940– 1941– 1941– 1942–

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Nikki Giovanni Alice Walker August Wilson Tim O’Brien Yusef Komunyakaa Leslie Marmon Silko Julia Alvarez Carolyn Forché Joy Harjo Jimmy Santiago Baca Judith Ortiz Cofer Rita Dove Gary Soto Amy Tan Sandra Cisneros Louise Erdrich Helena María Viramontes Barbara Kingsolver Chang-rae Lee

1943– 1944– 1945–2005 1946– 1947– 1948– 1950– 1950– 1951– 1952– 1952– 1952– 1952– 1952– 1954– 1954– 1954– 1955– 1965–

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