by John Updike
Weigh, for example, the opening lines of Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”:
The time is not remote, when I
Must by the course of nature die;
When I foresee my special friends,
Will try to find their private ends:
Though it is hardly understood,
Which way my death can do them good …
When the same expressions are recast in prose, with the rhymes suppressed, the pert effect turns sombre:
The time is not remote when I must, by the course Of nature, die. Then, I foresee, My special friends will try to find their private advantages, though it is hardly understood which way my death can benefit them …
The melancholy of the passage survives transposition into blank verse:
The time is not remote, when by the course
Of nature I must die: when, I foresee,
My special friends will seek their private gain,
Though it is hardly understood which way
My death can do them good …
And even pentameter couplets permit, in their length and variability, a certain speaking seriousness of tone:
The time, I fear, is not remote when by
The foreseen course of nature I must die:
When those that I considered special friends
Will try to comprehend their private ends;
Although as yet ’tis hardly understood
Which way my sorry death can do them good …
Pentameter is the natural speaking line in English; hexameter loses track of itself, and tetrameter chops up thoughts comically. Tetrameter is the natural light-verse line.
So this is Utopia, is it? Well,
I beg your pardon, I thought it was Hell.
This couplet was written by Beerbohm in a copy of More’s Utopia, and most of the poems in Max in Verse are footnotes, of some sort, to serious literature:
Milton, my help, my prop, my stay,
My well of English undefined,
It struck me suddenly today
You must have been an awful child.
On the verso of the title page of a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Max, while still at Oxford, wrote a “Ballade de la Vie Joyeuse,” beginning:
Why do men feast upon wormwood and gall
When there are roses for every day?
Let us not leave them to fade on the wall,
Knowing of naught but ‘la vie limitée.’
Is there a heaven? Be that as it may
Conduct’s an image of priest-eaten wood.
We are but bits of elaborate clay.
Let us be happy without being good.
Thus the neo-hedonism of the nineties is wickedly satirized merely by being too neatly put. Max in Verse is an enchanted island of a book, and its Ariel is a hovering, invisible, luminous insistence on the comedy (above and beyond the wit of the precious little that is being said) of versification itself. Beerbohm, following the lead of his master Calverley, whose parody of Browning abounds in tormented lines, repeatedly frames lines whose scansion is an absurd triumph of pedantry:
Automata these animalcula
Are—puppets, pitiable jackaclocks.
*
Savonarola will not tempted be
By face of woman e’en tho’ ’t be, tho’ ’tis,
Surpassing fair. All hope abandon therefore.
I charge thee: Vade retro, Satanas!
Tho’ love be sweet, revenge is sweeter far.
To the Piazza! Ha, ha, ha, ha, har!
Examples abound: one final one. On the copyright page of his first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm, Max found the imprint
London: JOHN LANE, The Bodley Head
New York: CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Beneath it, he wrote in pen:
This plain announcement, nicely read,
Iambically runs.
The effortless a-b-a-b rhyming, the balance of “plain” and “nicely,” the need for nicety in pronouncing “Iambically” to scan—this is quintessential light verse, a twitting of the starkest prose into perfect form, a marriage of earth with light, and quite magical. Indeed, were I a high priest of literature, I would have this quatrain made into an amulet and wear it about my neck, for luck.
* After this review appeared, I received a letter from a very old lady who said she had been a personal friend of Beerbohm’s and that he had detested being called “Max.” I meant no offense; I was misled into impudence by the jaunty title of the collection itself, and by its cozy tone.
† Perhaps this sibylline sentence should be expanded. I think I meant that order is comic in the sense that it is deathless. The essence of a machine is its idea; though every part is replaced, the machine persists, as the (successful) embodiment of certain abstract notions. There is a something Platonic about machines; we speak, for example, of the 1937 Chevrolet as of a reality distinct from all the Chevrolets built in 1937. Likewise, a poem is a verbal machine infinitely reproducible, whose existence cannot be said to lie anywhere or to depend upon any set of atoms. Even a poem buried in a dead language can, with scholarship, be dug up and made to “work” again. Whereas that which is organic is specific and mortal. Its essence lies in its unique and irreplaceable animation. One says “He is gone” of a man whose body lies perfectly intact on the deathbed. Natural beauty is essentially temporary and sad; hence the impression of obscene mockery which artificial flowers give us, and our aversion—unlike the ages of faith—from duplicatory realism in painting. Chaos is tragic because it includes one’s individual death, which is to say the waste and loss of everything.
NO USE TALKING
LETTERS OF JAMES AGEE TO FATHER FLYE. 232 pp. Braziller, 1962.
Of my own writing have been as usual trying this that and the other thing, finishing little or nothing. Most of it has hung somewhere between satire and what I suppose would be called “moralistic” writing; I wish I could get both washed out of my system and get anywhere near what the real job of art is: attempt to state things as they seem to be, minus personal opinion of any sort. No use talking: for various reasons of weakness & lack of time I continually fall far short of, i.e. betray, things I know better than to betray.
Had James Agee been more productive of the poetic fiction he seemed destined to write, this book of letters—dispatched over a period of thirty years to his boyhood teacher and lifelong friend the Episcopalian priest James Harold Flye—presumably would not have been published. Both the flap copy and Robert Phelps’ introduction invite us to lament over Agee’s aborted and distracted career. Phelps quotes an especially precocious early letter, written from Harvard, and asks, “How then did Agee do with his gifts what he did do? Why did he not write a dozen Chekhov–Shakespeare novels [the letter describes such an ambition] instead of a quarter of a million unsigned words for Time and Fortune?”
Why not indeed? It is a good question; yet to ask it, in the form of a five-dollar book, is to reduce Agee to a question mark. A subtle insult hides in such homage. Phelps explains, “In Europe, works are all that are required of [authors], and they are honored accordingly. Here they must also use their bodies and personal histories and failures (above all, their failures) to make us emblems,” and goes on to install Agee in the American pantheon “with these letters as his testament, and the image of his scattered vocation as his didactic emblem.”
Rather unwittingly, these sentences take the pulse of a very sick literary situation. A fever of self-importance is upon American writing. Popular expectations of what literature should provide have risen so high that failure is the only possible success, and pained incapacity the only acceptable proof of sincerity. When ever in prose has slovenliness been so esteemed, ineptitude so cherished? In the present apocalyptic atmosphere, the loudest sinner is most likely to be saved; Fitzgerald’s crack-up is his ticket to Heaven, Salinger’s silence his claim on our devotion. The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and crit
icism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors. I resist Agee’s canonization by these unearthly standards. Authors should be honored only for their works. If Agee is to be remembered, it should be for his few, uneven, hard-won successes. The author of the best pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family owes no apology to posterity. As to “the quarter of a million unsigned words,” surely a culture is enhanced, rather than disgraced, when men of talent and passion undertake anonymous and secondary tasks. Excellence in the great things is built upon excellence in the small; Agee’s undoing was not his professionalism but his blind, despairing belief in an ideal amateurism.
The truth is that we would not think of Agee as a failure if he did not insist on it himself. “Meanwhile I am thirty and have missed irretrievably all the trains I should have caught.” “Or briefly, though the impulse is OK, / I haven’t, really, a damned thing to say.” “I am depressed because whether I am to live a very short time or relatively longer time depends … on whether or not I can learn to be the kind of person I am not and have always detested; and because, knowing my own character pretty well, I know pretty well what my chances are, even though I will try.” These letters brim with self-accusations. “I have a fuzzy, very middle-class, and in a bad sense of the word, Christian mind, and a very clouded sensibility.” “I knew I had some self-pity; I even defend it, in moderation. But I didn’t realize how much I have, and still don’t sufficiently.” “Another [fault] is the whole habit of physical self-indulgence; the only degree of asceticism or even moderation I’ve ever given a hoot for, let alone tried briefly to practice, has been whatever might sharpen enjoyment.… Another is in some way caring much too little whether I live or die.” “… I have nothing good to say about myself.…”
Of course, in writing to Father Flye, Agee is addressing not only a priest but the embodiment of his boyhood aspirations. Agee was religious in preferring self-disgust and even self-destruction to any downward adjustment of these aspirations. “I would certainly prefer death to reconciling myself.” Among the things he refused to be reconciled to was his own nature as a writer.
Alcohol—which appears in the first Harvard letters (“On the whole, an occasional alcoholic bender satisfies me fairly well”) and figures in almost every letter thereafter—was Agee’s faithful ally in his “enormously strong drive, on a universally broad front, toward self-destruction.” But I think his real vice, as a writer, was talk. “I seem, and regret it and hate myself for it, to be able to say many more things I want to in talking than in writing.” He describes his life at Harvard as “an average of 3½ hours sleep per night; 2 or 3 meals per day. Rest of the time: work, or time spent with friends. About 3 nights a week I’ve talked all night …” And near the end of his life, in Hollywood: “I’ve spent probably 30 or 50 evenings talking alone most of the night with Chaplin, and he has talked very openly and intimately.” And what are these letters but a flow of talk that nothing but total fatigue could staunch? “The trouble is, of course, that I’d like to write you a pretty indefinitely long letter, and talk about everything under the sun we would talk about, if we could see each other. And we’d probably talk five or six hundred pages.…”
He simply preferred conversation to composition. The private game of translating life into language, of fitting words to things, did not sufficiently fascinate him. His eloquence naturally dispersed itself in spurts of interest and jets of opinion. In these letters, the extended, “serious” projects he wishes he could get to—narrative poems in an “amphibious style,” “impressionistic” histories of the United States, an intricately parodic life of Jesus, a symphony of interchangeable slang, a novel on the atom bomb—have about them the grandiose, gassy quality of talk. They are the kind of books, rife with Great Ideas, that a Time reviewer would judge “important.” The poignant fact about Agee is that he was not badly suited to working for Henry Luce.
He half knew it. “The only writing I do which approaches decency is on this job [for Fortune]—and on other stuff I seem to be pretty well congealed.” Twelve years later, Agee wants “to write a weekly column for some newspaper or magazine—very miscellaneous but in general, detailed topical analysis of the very swift and sinister decline and perversion of all that might be meant by individualism … etc., etc.” In praising Kafka, he observes with curiosity that Kafka appears “in a way totally uninterested in ‘literature’ or ‘art’ except in so far as they are his particular instrument for studying, questioning and suggesting more sharply than he otherwise could.” Whereas Agee was far too “much moved and excited by Ideas—related with general existence and with art.” Ideas—particularly the American idea of the Great Novel, literature as a Puritan Absolute—obsessed Agee, and hounded him out of contentment with his genius, which was for spontaneous, gregarious commentary rather than patient, eremitical invention.
In the last of these letters, mostly written from the hospital bed where his overstrained heart had taken him, there are hints of reconciliation. His work with the movies—the coöperative art par excellence—affects him rather cheerfully. His prose takes on crispness. The tortuous, grinding note of self-reproach diminishes. Looking back on his career, he is pleasantly “surprised I have gotten done even the little that I have.” He coherently and masterfully sketches several script ideas—a scene from Candide, a moral (and satiric) film fantasy about elephants. His versatility, his ardent interest in “this that and the other thing,” were beginning to find channels; perhaps there was some use in talking. But his body was ruined, and abruptly his magnanimous spirit and eager intelligence vanished from the world of American letters, to whose Manichaean stresses he had been so sensitive, and whose opportunities he had been so ingeniously reluctant to seize.
STUFFED FOX
THE FOX IN THE ATTIC, by Richard Hughes. 352 pp. Harper, 1961.
Described in a prefatory note as the first installment of a long opus entitled The Human Predicament and concerned with Europe between the World Wars, this novel suffers from its condition as a curtain-raiser. The author is so busy setting the stage that the actors can scarcely be heard above the noise of carpentry. The prose, though occasionally brilliant and rarely careless, is generally wooden; the characterization, though it gives evidence of a broad experience of life and a genial, humane world view, is badly cramped by the exigencies of panoramism. The action shuttles back and forth between the England and the Germany of 1923, between the rich and the poor, between historical figures and fictional characters. Mr. Hughes has taken Tolstoy and Stendhal to heart; his rendering of the frustrated Munich Putsch pays an open debt to the Waterloo of The Charterhouse of Parma. But the overriding message of his masters—the essential idiocy of history—has eluded him, with the result that his personae seldom break free of the points they were created to illustrate. In its intervals of straight essay and speculation, the book is interesting, and it contains a daring attempt to make a “character” out of Hitler. The shocking fact is that, reduced to the intimate dimensions of fiction, this Chaplinesque, tormented outcast engages our sympathy and steals the show.
HONEST HORN
THE GATES OF HORN: A Study of Five French Realists, by Harry Levin. 554 pp. Oxford University Press, 1963.
Among the formulae of faint praise, none is more galling, and in a sense more futile, than the assertion that a book has the faults of its virtues. Yet Professor Levin’s massive and intensely meditated critical study does seem to me limited by the very elegance, balance, and scholarly scrupulosity that make it, within limits, wonderful. The Gates of Horn, the product of twenty-five years’ intermittent labor, is concerned, at its narrowest, with the novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and Proust. More broadly, it surveys, through the windows of nineteenth-century French fiction, the social history of France itself. And its broadest subject, announced in the first sentence, is “the relation between literature and life.” As the exposition advances outward through these spheres from the specific to the general, its encycloped
ic apparatus of quotation, allusion, and paraphrase explodes into a kind of wildly detailed vagueness. Nowhere, in these half-thousand packed pages, is there any statement about the relation between art and reality as incisive and memorable as, say, T. E. Hulme’s famous metaphor of the architect’s curves:
You know what I call architect’s curves—flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that “approximately.” He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind.… Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of the technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want.
