Assorted Prose

by John Updike

  And beat him when he sneezes.

  As a scientist, Carroll speaks for the unkind truth; which is truer to nature, Watt’s bee or Carroll’s crocodile?

  How skillfully she builds her cell!

  How neat she spreads the wax!

  And labors hard to store it well

  With the sweet food she makes.

  [Watts]

  How cheerfully he seems to grin,

  How neatly spreads his claws,

  And welcomes little fishes in

  With gently smiling jaws!

  [Carroll]

  Nonsense is as a rule subversive. Carroll—and Edward Lear and, in some poems, C. S. Calverley—attempted to strike up, through nonsense, an alliance with children against the heavy oppression of Victorian sense. Macdonald describes the “Alice” books as “systematic parodies of the grown-up world from the viewpoint of a child.” Her adventures touch on evolution, Newman, Disraeli, the rise of the newspapers, and many other topical concerns. And their general frame of amiable confusion and obstinate authority derives from the large middle-class Victorian households whose mixed decorums and alarums still echo in the childhood reminiscences of James Thurber and Clarence Day. In his poetic masterpiece “The Hunting of the Snark,” Carroll carried parody of his age into its troubled heart. The Snark, W. H. Auden has pointed out, represents the Meaning of Life, which, after being diligently pursued by a posse of respectable Victorian tradesmen, turns out to be a Boojum. Life is meaningless.

  Simultaneously, Edward Lear—like Carroll, a solitary, but, unlike him, a wanderer—was populating the geographical vistas opened to British exploitation with persons who amid mad predicaments admirably manifested insular imperturbability and pragmatic resourcefulness. What Carroll did for children’s Sunday-school lessons Lear did for their schoolbooks. For both men, cruelty and non sequitur were attributes of the perfect freedom that is innocence; they would be appealed to again in the children’s verses of Hilaire Belloc, but as the Victorian consensus disintegrated, parody itself went the way of Calverley and J. K. Stephen—subsided, that is, into literary criticism.

  The parodist’s customary pose is to be more sensible than the parodee. An Age of Sense in literature is, then, a lean time for him. It is no coincidence that modern English parody began, with James and Horace Smith’s Rejected Addresses, shortly after the onset of romanticism. Between the romantic hallucinations of the dying Middle Ages, whose parodic monument in this collection is Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, and the appearance of that all-time favorite victim, William Wordsworth, there is precious little English parody—fifty-odd pages in this anthology. And outside of Swift’s classic mock meditation and three Shakespearean winks—at euphuism, Marlowe’s “mighty line,” and Nashe’s twittering “wit”—it oscillates between mild imitation and coarse vendetta. There is lacking the right combination of affection and asperity. In truth, the significant neoclassic writers defied parody. Isaac Hawkins Browne apparently had the ideal parodist’s temperament; he was a gentleman, wrote little, never finished his Latin masterpiece, and served two terms in Parliament without ever taking the floor. And the samples that Macdonald prints from Browne’s slim volume A Pipe of Tobacco show meticulous observation and some comic sense. A Popian couplet runs:

  Nor less, the critic owns thy genial aid,

  While supperless he plies the piddling trade.

  But the trouble is that a parody of Pope makes no effect qualitatively different from the original; parodied Pope seems second-rate Pope.

  Parody is in essence anti-romantic; it is small and hard instead of big and soft, it is selfless instead of self-obsessed. Romanticism presented to parody’s gun sights a broad sweep of stylistic excess, a high seriousness, and—most important—an individual distinctness of literary personality. What is inviting about Wordsworth is that his written works behave so humanly. He takes us by the elbow and steers us along on our walk with him, exclaiming, explaining, expecting us to take delight in everything he sees simply because he sees it. When we are not delighted, his innocently wise old eyes seem to widen in astonishment on the face of the page. Milton, equally humorless, equally precipitate in his confident claims on our attention, resists parody, though there are tons of bent burlesque heaped around the base of his monument. The reason lies, perhaps, in the curious impersonality of Milton’s poetry; it is unmistakably from a single hand, but the hand might be that of a god or a monster. Milton’s oeuvre has a consistent identity, and as a man he had a character, but the relationship between the two is, somehow, a deduced one. In Wordsworth the two are inextricable, and his literary face is susceptible of caricature.

  Discounting pushovers like Southey and Swinburne, the most-parodied authors in our language are Wordsworth, Browning, Whitman, Henry James, and Hemingway. Why these five? Well, for one thing, these men are all persons. We know their faces; they led more or less publicly bardic lives. They are not, like Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, voices speaking from a hermit’s grave. Again, their work presents a constant face; they are not, like Tennyson and Joyce, too protean to catch at one grab. And obviously each carries his style to extremes that verge on the absurd. But extremism is not in itself enough. Shelley and Thomas Wolfe lead parody into extensions of dullness. Involuntary outpour gives parody no foothold; the stylistic eccentricity must be a willed thing. The style should contain the visible motions of conscious decision, of choice; to deliberate choices criticism can attach. All five, when they nod, expose the same chink to the arrows of parody: the gap between their literary sophistication and their pretensions to the colloquial. This is perhaps least plain in the case of James, but observe, in Beerbohm’s “The Guerdon” and, scarcely diminuendo, in the late James himself, how the scrupulously long sentences tiptoe forward through the demisemiquavers of qualification to offer us, like a dime-store locket on the end of the gold chain, some little cliché, or trinket, mounted proudly in quotes, of contemporary “idiom.” A kindred incongruity is present in Wordsworth’s and Hemingway’s doctrinaire simplicity; Browning’s chatty, snorting bookishness; and Whitman’s—in Emerson’s phrase—“mixture of the Bhagavad Gita and the New York Herald.” All five contain passages in which the style becomes Bergson’s encrustation of the mechanical upon the organic—when the author, like the cat in the animated cartoon, continues his stroll over the cliff edge and in serene incognizance pedals the air.

  No author is completely invulnerable to parody. Shakespeare has dwarfed his contemporaries out of all comparison, but had one of them (say, that Robert Greene who called him “an upstart crow beautified with our feathers”) executed a parody when Shakespeare was still a man among men, we would have a valuable clue to the character of a talent that now seems so uniformly successful as to be characterless.* Like a painting in which each stroke equals a dab of detail or vibration of light, a good parody can be expanded, sentence by sentence, into an analysis of its object. To please us, this analysis should be just. Its malice (and there is always a little) should be cunningly disguised. “Myra Buttle” on Eliot, and Gilbert Highet on Pound—both included in this anthology—are not cunning enough. Highet’s imitation of Pound’s foul temper is rather too good; his sneers at the poet’s Idaho origins are downright painful. Parody perilously floats on the Philistine Sea, and a pinch of invective sinks it. Any overt reaching for gags shatters its illusion. An example, from Felicia Lamport’s parody of By Love Possessed:

  Author Winner went to his desk; he was a man who liked to settle his accounts promptly, his ancestors on both sides having been early settlers.

  And I remember a parody of Lawrence Durrell† referring to the “Copt on the beat.” The trouble with these puns is that they would not by any stretch of the imagination have occurred in the original. The main comic resource—the pretense of seriousness—has been dropped to pick up a jimcrack joke. As well as just and pure, a parody should be complex. It should not keep making the same complaint. Since parodies compress critical observations at a fearf
ul rate, they can hardly be too brief. Cyril Connolly’s parody of Aldous Huxley keeps up a full head of steam for nine pages of this book—but what a wealth of devices Connolly pours into the boiler! At the other extreme are two very short, and very satisfactory, parodies by Firman Houghton of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, two poets somewhat off this particular beaten path.

  Finally, a parody is not a piece of patient verbal construction like a crossword puzzle or a palindrome; it must be an inspired thing. It must have a grace, a pleased unfolding, of its own. In this respect, the too few parodies by E. B. White seem to me exceptional. Hemingway as a commuter, Whitman as the comradely afflatus of the Classics Club—White enters into these fancies with a sweet abandon that leaves the finicky problems of imitation far behind, solved as if they had never been posed. This quality, of surrender, seems increasingly rare in American parody, which too brusquely hastens to score points on its subjects. Robert Benchley’s parodies are guilty of this, but are redeemed by being, as apparently even Benchley’s check endorsements were, implacably funny. His parodies of children’s tales, opera plots, and a Spanish folk singer’s program notes probably contain the highest density of laughs per square inch attainable without microfilm.

  Of the present relative dearth of parody, much might be said. For one thing, there is some, written and acted; the comedy team of Nichols and May and the old Sid Caesar television show have presented some delicious, if not strictly literary, parody. The shortage may be not so much of parodists as of parodees. Beerbohm and the American wits of the thirties and forties worked fertile ground; the contemporary men of letters were respectable and prominent. The literary landscape of the fifties, in retrospect (and with exceptions, all of which were hungrily snapped up by parodists), seems a landscape of ruins—of empty temples, jerry-built “developments,” exploded timber, and premature collapse. In such a wasteland, even the buzzards starve. Macdonald interestingly relates parody, as a subdivision of satire, to the centralization of civilization—in the English universities of the last century, in the Manhattan of this. It could be that our homogeneous and multitudinous nation no longer possesses a center from which the eccentric can be judged. A Hollywood gossip column recently quoted a young songstress as saying, “I’m strictly a conformist. Nowadays that’s the only way to be different.”

  In any case, the decline of parody is part of the palpable decline in humor as a genre. This decline is generally viewed, by those interested enough to notice it, as a symptom of disease—nuclearphobia, Cold War chilblains, hardening of the emotional arteries, and so forth. With equal reason it might be viewed as a symptom of recovery, and the flowering of humor per se as a sign of unhealth. Laughter is but one of many potential human responses; to isolate humor as a separate literary strain is as unnatural as to extract a genre of pathos or of nobility from the mixed stuff of human existence. Insofar as “serious” literature is indeed exclusively serious, then humor, as in the Victorian age, has a duty, in the Parliament of Man, to act as the loyal opposition. But when, as in this century, the absurd, the comic, the low, the dry, and the witty are reinstated in the imaginative masterworks, then humor as such runs the risk of becoming merely trivial, merely recreational, merely distracting. A skull constantly grins, and in the constant humorist there is a detachment and dandyism of the spirit whose temporary abeyance in this country need not be cause for unmitigated lamenting.

  * And in fact Beerbohm’s “Savonarola,” though produced three centuries after the event, is virtually such a clue; at least it declares what seems unreal about Shakespeare’s versification and dramaturgy now.

  † By Roger Angell, who since this was written has established himself, especially with his brilliant three-ply parody of Norman Mailer, Casey Stengel, and Arthur Miller, as the best parodist practicing.

  RHYMING MAX*

  MAX IN VERSE, Rhymes and Parodies, by Max Beerbohm, edited by J. G. Riewald. 167 pp. Stephen Greene Press, 1963.

  Into the present twilight of light verse an oblique ray has entered from the unexpected direction of Vermont, where the Stephen Greene Press, a Brattleboro outfit, has published (handsomely) Max in Verse, a collection, painstakingly scavenged from widely scattered sources, of everything from the pen of Max Beerbohm that can be construed, however remotely, as a poem. The construing and scavenging, along with much annotating, have been performed by Professor J. G. Riewald, Beerbohm’s bibliographer. His labors have been heroic—in fact, considering the fragility of his subject’s claim to the title of poet, mock-heroic. The literary oddments of Shakespeare, were some to turn up, could not be more reverently handled. Eighty-four items by Beerbohm, many of them tiny, are buttressed fore and aft by (1) acknowledgments to forty-eight institutions and individuals for their help; (2) a foreword by S. N. Behrman, one of America’s leading “Maximilians,” to use a term that apparently has the same relation to Beerbohm that “Mohammedans” does to Mohammed; (3) a preface by Professor Riewald; (4) thirty pages, in eight-point Baskerville, of sources and annotations; (5) an index of titles and first lines; and (6) another index, of “Persons,” ranging from

  Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, 105, 151

  Andrea del Sarto, 93

  through

  James, Henry, 19, 21–4 passim, 56, 137, 139

  Jerome, Jerome K., 15, 135, 136

  Jesus Christ, 126

  to

  Zeno, 81

  Zumpt, Karl, 3, 131

  Of the four-score-and-four poems so elaborately enshrined in print, twenty or so were jotted by Max on the flyleaves or in the margins of books, two were scribbled in letters to friends, and one was found in his top hat. Five are in Latin; seven are sonnets of which Beerbohm, playing a game with Edmund Gosse or the William Rothensteins, wrote only alternate or third lines; one is a collection of spurious country saws (e.g., “It isn’t the singing kettle that scalds the cook’s hand” and “He that hath no teeth hath no toothache” and “A dumb woman sees more things than a blind man hears”); and another is a four-line epitaph for Bernard Shaw recited to two professors at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, in Washington, D.C., by an inmate, Mr. Ezra Pound, who had learned the quatrain at Max’s knee when they were neighbors in Rapallo—a remarkable modern instance of the oral poetic tradition, employing none but the most distinguished personnel. The longest items in Max in Verse are the pseudo-Shakespearean burlesque “Savonarola,” already available in the book Seven Men, and “A Sequelula to The Dynasts,” a blank-verse parody of Hardy that is woven into A Christmas Garland. Professor Riewald not only superfluously reprints these staples of Maxiana (as the Maximilians say), he snips from their familiar contexts several parodic snatches of Belloc and Kipling, the decadent poems of the fictional Enoch Soames, and two three-line fragments composed (in Latin and the Oxfordshire dialect) by Zuleika Dobson’s unhappy admirer the Duke of Dorset. This accounting leaves to mention a number of elegantly turned ballades, rondeaux, and triolets; some limericks no better than most; a few infallibly deft takeoffs on Kipling, Yeats, and Tom Moore; two relatively heavy and personal ballads; and, here and there, redeemed from quaint corners, delicate as fossils, epigrams marking the flitting imprint of Max’s daintily waspish temper.

  One might suppose that a collection so curious, a portentously served potpourri of private jokes and déjà vu, would add up to a worthless book. But Max in Verse is precious in both senses; it is both overrefined and valuable. Its value, which is felt in terms of delight, can perhaps be understood through some consideration of light verse.

  Modern light verse, as it was created by Calverley, calls into question the standards of triviality that would judge it. When we open Calverley’s Fly Leaves to the first page, and read

  ’Tis the hour when white-horsed Day

  Chases Night her mares away;

  When the Gates of Dawn (they say)

  Phœbus opes:

  And I gather that the Queen

  May be uniformly seen,

  Should the weather be serene,


  On the slopes,

  a universe of importance is pulled down. The conceits and figures by which men have agreed to swear and live are tripped up by metrics, flattened by the simple inopportuneness of rhyme.

  Language is finite and formal; reality is infinite and formless. Order is comic; chaos is tragic.† By rhyming, language calls attention to its own mechanical nature and relieves the represented reality of seriousness. In this sense, rhyme and allied regularities like alliteration and assonance assert a magical control over things and constitute a spell. When children, in speaking, accidentally rhyme, they laugh, and add, “I’m a poet / And don’t know it,” as if to avert the consequences of a stumble into the supernatural. The position of rhyme in Western literature is more precarious than is popularly supposed. The Greeks and Romans were innocent of it, and it appears in Latin poetry as an adjunct of the Mass, probably as an aid to the memory of the worshippers. Rhymed sacred poetry, of which classical examples are the “Stabat Mater” and the “Dies Irae,” dates from the fourth century; for a thousand years rather pell-mell rhyme and alliteration dominated verse. As the sea of faith ebbed and consciousness of chaos broke in again upon civilization, rhymelessness returned—in England, as both the deliberate revival of quantitative measure sponsored by Gabriel Harvey and the spontaneous ascendance of the pentameter blank verse invented by Surrey and developed by Marlowe and Shakespeare. The bulk of great English poetry, from Shakespeare to Milton, from Wordsworth to Wallace Stevens, is unrhymed. And those poets of the first rank, like Pope, who habitually rhyme do so unobtrusively—that is, Pope’s couplets turn on unspectacular monosyllables; there is no glorying in rhyme, as there is in a medieval poet like John Skelton or a modern light-verse writer like Ogden Nash. The last considerable poets who preferred to rhyme are Emily Dickinson, Yeats, and Housman. Emily Dickinson’s rhyming is often off-rhyme, Yeats was a magician in pose, and Housman’s verse verges on being light. When all the minority reports are in, the trend of our times is overwhelmingly against formal regularity of even the most modest sort; in the Cantos, Pound has passed beyond free verse into a poetry totally arhythmic. Our mode is realism, “realistic” is synonymous with “prosaic,” and the prose writer’s duty is to suppress not only rhyme but any verbal accident that would mar the textural correspondence to the massive, onflowing impersonality that has supplanted the chiming heavens of the saints. In this situation, light verse, an isolated acolyte, tends the thin flame of formal magic and tempers the inhuman darkness of reality with the comedy of human artifice. Light verse precisely lightens; it lessens the gravity of its subject.