Humanizing The Vacuum

Clive James is a delight. From “Mark Twain, Journalist:”

Yet Twain, for all his susceptibility to plausible wheezes, as no crank. He was crazy about know-how. He was a can-do merchant, a prototype for Gyro Gearloose and all those nutty inventors who go on building weird machine sin the backyard sheds of American popular culture, even in the space age. And after all, some of the machines work. Twain’s typesetting machine almost did. Twain was in tune with the mechanical efflorescence of the new nation. For him, there was no separation between machinery and poetry. You couldn’t even call him a proto-Futurist, because for him art and machinery had never grown apart to the point of needing to be reunited. He had been brought up to the practical. The printing house was his high school and the river-boat his university. He could make things work. It was one of the qualities that the women of Paris loved about the liberating American troops of 1944 – all those Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns who rode six to a jeep. It wasn’t just that they could get you chocolate and sheer stockings: when they had finished kissing you, they could fix your bicycle.

Eighty-two. She published a lot of drivel in her last twenty years. If you’d accused her of using poetry as a platform on which to educate the general public about patriarchal heterosexist injustice, she would have happily agreed. I have no idea how she responded to Harold Bloom’s dismissal of her guest editing of The Best American Poetry’s 1996 edition – ”a badness not to be believed,” he actually wrote, “a Stuffed Owl of bad verse, and of much badness that is neither verse nor prose.” At twenty-two, beguiled by formalism (I chose James Merrill as the subject of my first masters thesis idea), I agreed. In the chiseled iambics of Roethke and Plath, or the looser rhythms and enjambments of H.D. it’s still possible to see the blood seeping through the clenched knuckles. “Form’s what affirms,” Merrill once wrote.

That was then. While still treasuring the tension between formalism and hysteria in the pre-Diving Into The Wreck work, I can savor the way in which a poem like 1987′s “Dreamwood” sees alternative histories in the palimpsests of what our predecessors bequeath us:

It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come.

In a few marvelous essays Rich also articulated the frustrations of unrealized wives and mothers who can’t see beyond the clichés of lesbianism; these clichés, she argues, originate in centuries of male perversion of their definitions. There had to be other terms for the cords of intimacy that bind women. There had to be other ways of thinking about the destinies of women:

We need a far more exhaustive account of the forms the double-life has assumed. Historians need to ask at every point how heterosexuality as institution has been organized and maintained through the female wage scale, the enforcement of middle-class women’s “leisure, ” the glamorization of so-called sexual liberation the withholding of education from women, the imagery of “high art’ and popular culture, the mystification of the “personal” sphere, and much else. We need an economics that comprehends the institution of heterosexuality, with its doubled workload for women and its sexual divisions of labor, as the most idealized of economic relations.

This excerpt from “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” defined how the future of womanhood looked in 1980: battered by the Carter years’ retreat on feminism, afraid of what the eighties would bring. I doubt Rich knew – did anyone? How would Rich have responded to this?

It’s a credit to Rich’s far-reaching influence that according to The New York Times obit cited above, she sold almost a million books! At least a million people reeled on first reading not just “Compulsory Heterosexuality” but “When We Dead Awaken” and the other essays in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Or “Vesuvius at Home,” her essential guide to understanding the convulsions at work in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. The work – the struggle – continues.

Slate’s highly variable arts coverage gets a lift from David Blight’s excellent reevaluation of Edmund Wilson’s magisterial Patriotic Gore, his 1962 study of Civil War literature and personages. Besides an incisive chapter on Lincoln’s prose style which proved educational for me a decade ago, Wilson includes a meditation on the forgotten figure of Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president and author of one of the few manifestos of racism and separatism published by a statesman of the first rank. Like admirer Gore Vidal, Wilson in the early sixties was so disgusted by the ways in which the United States used his tax dollars to fund a national security state that this distemper sometimes led him to entertain muddled crushes on men who, as he wrote, “”will not accept domination.” Thus, despite Blight’s emphasis on Patriotic Gore‘s willingness both to dispel cliches about the Civil War and to embrace how myths — what Wallace Stevens would call supreme fictions — sustain us, Wilson’s admiration for Stephens leads him to accept that the war’s casus belli was “states rights.” Never mind the Confederate “constitution” — here’s Stephens himself: “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

Patriotic Gore matters most as a barometer monitoring the dips and erratic swells of concision and pungency that are Edmund Wilson’s hallmarks as a critic. If his prose is less lyrical than Alfred Kazin’s or his intelligence evinces less of a philosophical bent than Lionel Trilling’s (although the first third of To The Finland Station suffers most from this failing), it has some of the virtues that Wilson saw in U.S. Grant’s own style: impassivity, imperturbability, “his persistence in a prosaic tone combined with a certain abstractness.” This observation on the trouble with Henry Adams is right on, the kind of shrewdness for which I’ve strived as a writer:

You feel that he is constantly shifting between a mood of ironic malice at the expense of the sordid era to which Grant’s presidency has given free rein and the consciousness of a personal inadequacy that he fears is his own fault. His writing looks clear on the page, but when we begin to read one of his books, we soon realize how sinuous his style is and how uncertain are the ideas it conveys, how treacherous its irony becomes…

This is my kind of pith.

A fan of Joan Didion since I bought the aptly titled Political Fictions in 2001, I bought A Book of Common Prayer during this weekend’s latest Borders liquidation sale (I paid three dollars for a pristine copy). Is this a good introduction to her fictin?

A former Borders employee describes the chain’s deterioration from its late nineties peak. Having worked at Books & Books, Miami’s most famous independent bookstore, I can vouch for the truth of what we employees did after hours, as well as how much all of us loved books. My collection of Andre Breton books, for instance, I bought in Borders in ’93 or ’94. Also: Henry James’ The Awkward Age, SPIN Alternative Record Guide, and the letters of Wallace Stevens.

The Book of J, Harold Bloom’s most rewarding book, posits an Old Testament god as petulant and erratic as any Olympian. Yahweh isn’t a god you worship: he’s a god you collude with or outsmart. Along those lines, I liked today’s NYT blog post about Jonah, his favorite book in the Bible. The great critic Randall Jarrell agreed: forty years ago he included Jonah in his anthology Book of Stories.

The Awl publishes a long, truculent, loving analysis of The Christopher Hitchens Problem. Maria Bustillos identifies what makes Hitchens crusade — I mean this literally — against religion such a bore, even to those of us who embrace the instinct with enthusiasm:

God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens’ best-selling diatribe, enumerates his (quite justifiable) hatred of the crimes committed in the name of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc., without bothering to acknowledge that the cruel and greedy will twist any institution at all, religious or secular, to suit their purposes. All three authors appear to believe that Islam, Christianity, Judaism, etc., are literally evil organizations.

Can these authors (one of whom wrote The Selfish Gene, one of the most fascinating and brilliant books of the last century,) really be so boneheaded as to fail to understand that every institution, political, academic or religious, can be, and has been, ennobled by free-thinking, brilliant men and women as often as they have been perverted by criminals and thieves and idiots? Yes, there is Pat Robertson, and there is Fred Phelps, and there are also Dr. Rowan Williams and Reinhold Neibhur and Bishop Fuglsang-Damgaard and countless principled and even heroic men and women of faith, it seems ridiculous to have to say.

Bustillos is incorrect about one point: after scoffing at Hitchens’ disinterest in the King James Bible and Dalai Lama, she wonders: “Hitchens mawkishly advises that we seek the infinite in ‘the beauty and mystery of the double helix’ instead. Why not a rose? Seriously.” I can find several instances in God is Not Great, among other Hitchens books, in which Hitchens praises religious art, Milton, George Herbert, and, yes, the King James Bible itself.

But I defend him for the same reasons Bustillos does:

But there is the business, there is the performance of a journalistic persona, there is the professional bon vivant, and there is also the man, whose voice on the page is still so young and alive, and who belies all the bullshit sometimes, even now.

She closes with an excerpt from an address delivered squarely at the young audience of the Prestonwood Christian Academy — a beautiful one. I won’t cite it here. Read it yourself.

In a review of a revised edition of Kingsley’s The King’s English, Martin Amis writes:

Usage is irreversible. Once the integrity of a word is lost, no amount of grumbling and harrumphing can possibly restore it. The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who minds about words.

Recently I’ve noted my campaigns to instill awareness of usage in my students. Thumbing through Amis’ book brought to my attention a few other examples of usage. He’s no pedant:

DIALOGUE. In the past, talks or discussions o no important subjects were considered to be satisfactorily described as talks or discussions. Nowaways the two sides in a dispute, for instance, are apt to be engaged in (wait for it) a meaningful dialogue. The first element of this phrase is an absurdity, since no dialogue is meaningless, and the second illiterate, since any reasonable number can take part in dialogue or a dialogue…And anyway the whole meaningful-dialogue expression look sand sounds unbearably pompous. Nevertheless one would not wish to be deprived of a phrase that so unerringly points out its user as a humorless ninny.

I learned that decimate, as its Latin antepenultimate syllable would suggest, is a word derived from the Roman practice of executing every tenth man in a mutinous or demoralized party of soldiers, “so to decimate in English was used to mean ‘destroy a small but noticeable part of.’ Most of us use decimate to mean “damage beyond repair.” Amis The Right Wing Crank leaks into his dismissal of the way in which feminism has reclaimed chauvinism, once a byword for “bellicose patriotism” derived from Nicolas Chauvin, a French soldier fanatically devoted to Napoleon. The King’s English is great fun.

Martin Amis’ introduction to the late Kingsley’s The King’s English, in which its author reminds us of the true definition of  “infamous” and the imprecision and sheer ugliness of words and phrases like eke out, brutalise, and decimate. Amis forgot other noun-cum-verbs like victimize and impact. I quiver with joy at the thought of what short work he’d have made of “hate on,” as in, “Why do you hate on Rihanna?”

Coincidentally, my students will discuss “Politics and the English Language” and an example of a magazine or newspaper article replete with semantic and linguistic barbarisms of the kind that Orwell described.

Usage is irreversible. Once the integrity of a word is lost, no amount of grumbling and harrumphing can possibly restore it. The battle against illiteracies and barbarisms, and pedantries and genteelisms, is not a public battle. It takes place within the soul of every individual who minds about words.

The most useful rule (and Martin applauds Kingsley’s pragmatism): “The aim of language is to ensure that the speaker [or the writer] is understood, and all ideas of correctness or authenticity must be subordinate to it.”

The Washington press called Supreme Court justices Harry Blackmun and Warren Burger the Minnesota Twins because their friendship stretched back to their kindergarten days and work as lawyers in the aforementioned state. This taxonomical distinction applies to Bob Mould and Paul Westerberg. So many times over the years have the singer-songwriters of Hüsker Dü and the Replacements respectively been the objects of partisanship. Which one you preferred depended, theoretically, on your tolerance for Westerberg’s sloppiness “versus” Mould’s tighter reins on those biographical details which endear frontmen to fans. Thanks to his self-control (which by all accounts is adamantine), he flourished in the nineties. The two studio albums, EP, and B-sides compilation he released as leader of a power trio called Sugar show no waning of creativity; he invented grunge turbulence, and, boy, does he bludgeon those young pretenders into submission (rhetorical question: did Nirvana or the Melvins record songs as brutal as “JC Auto” or “The Slim”?)

Mould’s memoir See a Little Light gets the treatment in today’s New York Times. No surprise that the critic notes Mould’s severity; the man is as volatile as Oliver Cromwell. Even when he plumbed so-called “confessional” material in “Hardly Getting Over It,” his cinder block of a voice enforced a polite distance; it’s the difference between reading journal entries and listening to the writer himself (1989′s solo Workbook came closest to Westerberg-esque catharsis, especially on tracks like “Brasilia Crossed With Trenton,” to conventional catharsis). I haven’t read the book yet, but the complaint about its lapses into therapeutic claptrap in its last third still don’t seem anomalous: Mould would put his talent into a memoir and genius into songs.

From Sam Tanenhaus’ review of Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence:

The revelation came in Bloom’s “misreadings” — the linkages he found. He made the reader see how John Ashbery really had emerged from Wallace Stevens, just as Stevens had from Whitman; that Browning harbored the ghost of Shelley; that Tennyson issued from Keats. The point was not that “father” and “son” sounded alike. Much of the time they didn’t. The affinities occurred outside the familiar realm of echoes and allusions, of intended references.

Bloom’s theory, he explains in his new book, was the offshoot of his own reading habits, principally his freakish capacity for memorization. He discovered it in childhood, and it never left him. In the early 1960s, he “memorized at first hearing” W. S. Merwin’s “Departure’s Girl-Friend,” a poem of some 40 lines, after Merwin gave a reading at Yale. And even now “I possess almost all of Hart Crane by memory.”

When I met Harold Bloom at a Miami Book Fair event in 2000. during which he promoted How To Read and Why, I asked him to inscribe his favorite verse from his favorite poem in my copy of The Western Canon. I expected a Wallace Stevens excerpt, and he did not disappoint. The bulbous eyeballs slapped shut; the head rolled backwards; and the Great Man sort of exhaled the final life from “Sunday Morning:” “Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” Disappointed by its predictability, I asked for his impressoons of my own favorite Stevens line, buried in “The Novel,” one of his least recognized poems (“The fire burns as the novel taught it how”). His head shook with the subtlest of dismissals. But this faded when, thirty minutes into his lecture, he left the crowd spellbound with a recitation of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” from memory. It was a performance in the classic sense: Bloom’s stentorian bullfrog tones hurling the lines at us (I HAVE BECOME A NAME FOR ALWAYS ROAMING WITH A HUNGRY HEART!). At its conclusion no one dared applaud; our pants were soaked.

In graduate school, I learned from my professors to regard Bloom as a sort of Falstaff of litcrit, which, of course, would have tickled him. Too late. They disliked his facility; he had made a show of Reading Everything. He wrote expansive prefaces to his Modern Critical Interpretations series on Austen, Mann, Musil, Roth, et al, even for his enemies. What I learned from Bloom, and, later, from Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, and his hated Eliot, was how to forge a style sure in its judgments and expectant of ridicule. He dismissed Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell as “period pieces.” He valued Shelley over other Romantic poets. He persuaded me to memorize the second poem in Hart Crane’s “Voyages” sequence (“And yet this great wink of eternity…”). He preached the virtues of catholicism — of experimenting widely with the purpose of developing what he called “interiority” — but recoiled at any tracts which demanded special pleading, be it Marxist, gay, or feminist (he adored James Merrill and Elizabeth Bishop yet thought of ever more novel ways of shitting on Adrienne Rich and Alice Walker). As a critic I envy his resume: gadfly, best-seller, pedant.

Every generation in American history endures a “renewed” interest in the Framers, usually for the sake of political ends. Joseph Ellis and David McCullough are only the two most popular writers of hagiography on Adams, Jefferson, Washington, et al. No offense intended, necessarily: Ellis’ brief Passionate Sage, published in the early nineties, remains the best short biography of Adams extant, never shirking from the peculiarities of our most irascible Founder (the most memorable bit: a xeroxed reproduction of Adams’ expansive, vituperative marginalia preserved in his copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women; the man could not stop reminding non-enemies that he was smarter than them and got there first, whatever “it” was). For a more trenchant analysis of Adams’ political views — which, to its credit, the HBO miniseries didn’t elide — consult John Patrick Diggins’ equally brief entry in the American Presidents Series.

For more than thirty years, Gordon S. Wood has deepened Revolution and Framer scholarship by applying largely discredited (or absorbed into other theoretical disciplines) New Historical methodology. His Empire of Liberty, a splendid sequel to The Radicalism of the American Revolution, eschews biographical sketches for a view of the period as a discrete epoch — itself no doubt an anachronistic way of studying it — in which the rise of populism allows the flowering of or, in some cases, conflicts with the origins of judicial review, the extra-constitutional acquisition of land (e.g. Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana), corporations, a free press, and, yes, slavery. Speaking of anachronisms, the premise of Empire of Liberty is quaint in its devotion to what I’ll call Zinnism: the years between 1789 and 1815 saw a triumph of democracy. For this to be so, Wood spends almost a third of his seven-hundred-plus page opus chronicling the heresies of Federalism: its pretensions to monarchism, its contempt for men without property or antecedents. Federalists, Wood argues, were out of step with the times and doomed to failure.

I find it odd that, other than acknowledging Alexander Hamilton’s farsightedness in establishing a national bank and requesting that the federal government absorb the debts incurred by the states during the war, Wood does little to assure readers that without Washington’s confidence in admitted loons like Hamilton we would still have remained a loose aggregate of states. So quick is he to wrinkle his nose at Adams’ theories about popular sovereignty that he fails to apportion him the proper credit for risking his presidency in a successful attempt to wrangle the States out of a potentially ruinous war with France (and risk he did: Adams became our first one-term president. The second? His son John Quincy). A believer in what those of us who were still taught American history in high school learned as “the Revolution of 1800,” Wood’s narrative impatiently taps its foot in anticipation of the triumph of Jeffersonian thought.

The best model for my kind of approach remains Henry Adams’ History of the United States of America, an exhaustive account of the Jefferson and Madison administrations which will take you a lifetime to read but approaches In Search of Lost Time and surpasses Dance to the Music of Time in its dialectic suppleness; Adams might be the only significant ironist to emerge in American literature. So enraptured is Adams with the contradictive possibilities of a figure like Thomas Jefferson that he has the patience and skill to draw out his multifoliate personality in protracted accounts of his negotiations to get Louisiana and the Floridas from the Spanish and French. I haven’t finished the book and neither will you, but don’t fret: the New York Review of Books, in another example of its devotion to preserving the best of American letters, published an extremely abridged version consisting of the first and last chapters in 2006. It coincided with the publication of Garry Wills’ terrific booklength Cliffs Notes-esque reading of Adams’ text and the history (weird, yes).

But Empire of Liberty is magisterial in the best sense: it can survey what even a skeptic will call an era while marshaling a wealth of primary text research to illuminate the commonplace (I didn’t know, for example, that slave society in the eighteenth century boasted a modicum of  social mobility that the nineteenth would largely reject). Wood is very good on rascals like Aaron Burr and secondary but fascinating characters like Dr. Benjamin Rush, friend to both Jefferson and Adams and a genuine liberal in both the nineteenth and twentieth century senses of the word. If you need one book that touches on every trend and personage of the period, Empire of Liberty will do until you find the fortitude to dip into History of the United States of America.