by Muriel Spark
And yet, over forty years later, there would be no way of accepting, far less realising, Eliot’s formula for the transmission of a civilised culture. Eliot’s Utopia called for a spiritual elite, an aristocracy of taste, learning, manners and morals. Nothing of that kind can now occupy the mind of any reasonable, educated and full-blooded human being. Eliot’s analysis of the decline in ethical and aesthetic standards which he observed in the world around him was brilliant. But no-one who fully loves life could possibly, now, accept his solution.
An American critic, the late Dwight Macdonald whose writings on the subject of mass culture were respected by Eliot, also treated of the deterioration of cultural standards. In his book of 1952 Against the American Grain, what Dwight Macdonald called Masscult and Midcult, he equally deprecated. He objected to the pressures on our spiritual lives of Hollywood and the disintegrating effects of popular literature and television on what he called High Culture.
But Macdonald offered a solution which Eliot himself described as an alternative to his own. ‘The mass audience,’ Macdonald wrote, ‘is divisible, we have discovered – and the more it is divided, the better. Even television, the most senseless and routinized expression of Masscult (except for the movie newsreels), might be improved by this approach.’
Dwight Macdonald, in fact, finally refused to accept the masses as anything but an abstract. In his support he cited Kierkegaard’s rejection of ‘the public’ as a concrete reality. Our cultural activities and our messages are addressed to groups of people. He foresaw the possibility that, in his own words, ‘…our new public for High Culture becomes conscious of itself and begins to show some esprit de corps, insisting on higher standards and setting itself out – joyously, implacably – from most of its fellow citizens, not only from the Masscult depths but also from the agreeable ooze of the Midcult swamp.’
As you see, I have only been able to skim the surface of a vast subject to which the nature of the Ingersoll Award gives rise; it concerns the protection of our human standards, the spiritual lives of our societies.
Speaking for myself I find that both high culture and moral philosophy are too often in the hands of people, who, while they have excellent judgment, have a limited sense of humour. The arts of ridicule and satire can be employed to demolish vulgarity, stupidity, crude and cruel behaviour. Ridicule is a strong and effective weapon. It should, I think, be studied as a means of expressing an honest literature in the world to-day.
For myself, moreover, I cannot dismiss any manifestation of mass culture en bloc. We should always observe; we should find what is preservable and precious among the welter of cultural phenomena with which we are constantly bombarded. This needs self-discipline, it needs self-training on the part of those gifted with ingenuity of approach, and with comprehension. Culture, after all, concerns the human spirit. A too narrow and severe discrimination can tend to annihilate ourselves, everything around us. And all to no effect.
Once in one of my novels I was drawn into writing a sermon. Into the mouth of the preacher I naturally put what he might be expected to say. But I added one strong conviction of my own which I find it relevant to repeat here: ‘…in whatever touches the human spirit, it is better to believe everything than nothing.’
[1992]
* Referring to the prize-winning Swiss scientist who was to receive the Science Award from the Ingersoll Foundation.
Pensée: T.S. Eliot
[…]
The influence of a poet like T.S. Eliot on younger poets is a good thing if it is received in a liberating sense; the release of language from a cramped and narrow range of poetic possibility was one of T.S. Eliot’s services to English literature. His best influence on younger poets resides in the possibilities he does not himself develop. Obscure though he is often called, he made it possible for other poets to write more lucidly.
[…]
[1953]
The Complete Frost
Robert Frost is the first traditional American poet. Having begun with this apparently contradictory statement (if he is traditional how can he be the first?) as well as a vague one (what is the American tradition?), I had better say what I mean.
Tradition begins somewhere, but it begins as something other than tradition. It does not become tradition until it is well under way; it exists only in retrospect. The American tradition of poetry might have descended from Poe or Whitman. But it began with Emerson. Emily Dickinson wrote in the American tradition, and we can only say so now – and only because this tradition has found a durable repository in Robert Frost.
I know that in America, what I have called the American tradition is looked upon by some as a regional one, as a New England tradition. But that would not explain why John Crowe Ransom, a southern poet, shares with Robert Frost those very elements which make up the tradition (however widely Ransom departs from Frost in other ways).
The most notable elements of this American tradition, which are concentrated in Robert Frost, are: emotional and intellectual austerity; naturalness of expression; objectivity (true of Emily Dickinson who must not be considered a subjective poet merely because she wrote in the first person); domestic imagery. None of these elements are present in Poe; nor in Whitman – unless you believe his mode of expression was natural. But they are present in Ransom; while they are not present, for example, in Marianne Moore, an interesting poet who is outside the American tradition. These distinctions between American traditionals and untraditionals are only possible because the tradition has been confirmed, a basis for the definition provided, by Robert Frost.
Evidence of his contact with English Georgian poets appears in his first book, A Boy’s Will; but between the publication of this, and his next work North of Boston, Robert Frost found his native genius. It was a transition from the poet of anonymously cultivated Georgian scenery, the poet of
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home
And lo, it is ended.
to the poet of New England agricultural life. From the appearance of this second book onward, Robert Frost developed those American traditional characteristics I have mentioned, in his own distinctive way. He had become the author of remarkable narrative poems – stories that would take a novelist three volumes to half-tell, done in dialogue within a few pages. He had become the poet of minute observation.
Here’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.
It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it…
Compared with the previous passage quoted above, this poem (by no means the poet’s most powerful one of this period) may illustrate where Robert Frost departed from the Georgian mode. His vision has become focused, presenting a clear outline of his object, in contrast to the blurred generalisation of fields, woods and highways of the earlier poem.
It is just this precise noticing of nature that makes Frost’s most unique contribution to the tradition; this has been a constant factor in his work since he got clear of Georgianism. But his poetry is not static; it has acquired flexibility of form, it has deepened in meaning. A curiosity of nature, merely observed and noted, as in the last-quoted poem, later finds a more potent subjective equivalent, as in the poem ‘Tree at my Window’:
But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed
And if you have seen me while I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
Robert Frost’s preciseness of vision is not attempted, nor intended to be conv
eyed by precise meaning. The reader is indeed aware of a system of thought, but the system operates with entire unconcern for rational premises. Such a statement as, for example,
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
…
The fault must partly be in me,
The bird was not to blame for his key.
And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.
conveys the experience lucidly enough. But the last couplet is inaccurate – Ulysses stopped his ears against the sirens’ song and was proved right.
To this, Frost might reply in one of his recent epigrams:
I love to toy with the platonic notion
That wisdom need not be of Athens Attic;
But well may be Laconic, even Boeotian,
At least I will not have it systematic.
[1951]
John Masefield
[…]
Towards the end of 1950 I was still a fairly unknown writer, a poet and critic. My poetry was moving more and more towards the narrative form. I was not yet ready to write novels. I thought in many ways that novels were a lazy way of writing poetry, and above all I didn’t want to become a ‘lady-novelist’ with all the slop and sentimentalism that went with that classification. (In that aim, at least, I have the satisfaction of having been successful.)
Although I now write novels, and only occasional poems, I still think of myself as a narrative poet. My novels are not verse, they are not poetic in the flowery sense. But I claim a poetic perception, a poet’s way of looking at the world, a synoptic vision.
Looking back at this work I wrote on Masefield, I feel a large amount of my writing on him can be applied generally; it is in many ways a statement of my position as a literary critic and I hope some readers will recognise it as such. Certainly I have changed over the intervening years, but my basic tenets remain surprisingly (even to me) constant.
***
I wrote to Masefield on 28th November, 1950, suggesting the book. He was the Poet Laureate, still in the public mind the ‘sailor poet’, but at that time not very widely read. I felt he was overlooked for the wrong reasons. Masefield replied immediately in his characteristically courteous manner:
I am much honoured, that you should wish to write about my work, and much touched that you should have read so much of it and continue its friend.
Would it be too much to ask, that you should first meet and talk with me?
I arranged to visit John Masefield at his house, Burcote Brook, Abingdon in Berkshire on 6 December 1950. He sent a car to meet me at Oxford Station. It was a freezing day. The snow was deep. Here is the account of my meeting with Masefield that I wrote in my Memorandum Book:
Dec. 8 1950
In bed with cold which was caught at Abingdon, and I can’t help thinking that if Masefield were not so intemperately ‘Temperant’ I would not be snuffling and choking thus – i.e. if he had offered me a drink on frozen Wednesday last. But I have not the heart to blame him for in all else he is a generous and delightful host.
He has a large house, much larger than I expected, with a lodge and drive. Somehow, I didn’t expect to find the atmosphere of comfort and success. A lovely-looking old man. Rosy cheeks, white skin, pure-white hair and moustache and blue, blue eyes. A charming voice which carefully enunciates all vowels and speaks boldly. First I was shown into his study which looks out on a long stretch of grass (frosted over on Wednesday) leading to a river running between clumps of trees. There was a large fire, comfortable chairs into one of which I was put, but M. chose a hard armless chair which he seemed to prefer (like the Admiral in ‘Dead Ned’). He asked me kindly about my journey; then spoke about Mary Shelley (on whom I had told him by letter I had written), and whom he described as an excellent widow, whatever kind of wife she made. He spoke of Shelley and his admiration for his work, though he (M) ‘did not think all priests and kings were evil’. Then of Godwin whom he disliked, he said, although he had read and enjoyed his novels when young. I asked if Caleb Williams had influenced ‘Dead Ned’ and he replied, yes possibly, though he was not aware of it & in fact could not remember the story. The idea of ‘Dead Ned’; he told me, was given him by a story he was told when dining at Barber Surgeons’ Hall. He was informed that the very table on which he was dining was that used formerly by the dissectors of hanged men, who had been condemned to be drawn and quartered, and exposed to public view. The surgeons who performed this office were under the secret oath of their society, to try to restore life whenever one of the hanged bodies showed signs of life (as frequently happened). M. was shown an oriental screen which had been sent by one of the criminals who had there been revived, to his surgeon-benefactors. It was the custom that when this reviving of the hanged took place, they were shipped abroad, just like Dead Ned. M. said that his brother had found some papers relating to some criminal who survived hanging and escaped rehanging through a pardon. These stories went to the making of the novel. He asked me a little about myself, but did not seem too curious. I told him a few brief details. He said how touched he was by my wishing to write the book, and I told him part of my plan. He said, in reference to Dauber that the story was told him exactly as it is recounted in the poem, even to the dying words of the Dauber ‘It will go on.’ He said he did not think much of Dauber either way, it was written so long ago. The Everlasting Mercy, he said, was of course a turning point in his career. (He did not seem keen to talk about his work, and so much that I wanted to ask him will now have to be put to him by letter.)
He spoke then of Rossetti and asked, I think, what is thought of him now. I said there is a tendency to think of him as a languishing aesthete. He said ‘Oh but when I was a young poet we looked upon Rossetti as the life force of poetry. Without Rossetti, Swinburne could not have been, William Morris could not have been, Burne-Jones could not have been.’ He went out to fetch Mrs Masefield whom I shall describe presently, then continued, ‘Without Rossetti they would all have been clergymen – Swinburne would have been a curate.’ Mrs M. laughed – a high cackle as is the laugh of the deaf, sometimes – and said, ‘Imagine Swinburne a curate.’ Masefield then spoke of Rossetti’s discovery of Fitzgerald and the enormous success of Rubaiyat. Every copy was sold and they were selling at a pound a-piece (originally the book was a farthing) until the day the copyright was released when about six publishers brought out Omar and once again they went into edition after edition. Mrs Masefield left the study to go and finish her letter and about ten minutes before lunch we joined her in a smaller room which had a smaller fire, burning logs and peat. She, too, preferred a low hard chair as she said she always wanted to fall asleep in a soft chair. She was a small, kindly person, very weird-looking, with an ear-apparatus and glasses that looked as if they covered one glass eye – at least one eye had a special lens that magnified the eye to look like a marble. She was dressed in an antique black hat trimmed with velvet, a red jersey and shortish old-fashioned grey skirt. Her voice was rather appalling, being due no doubt to some deafness. I liked her; and Masefield behaved with natural courtesy towards her. I should think she has been a true companion to him. They talked of their travels, from time to time, speaking of the lion farm at Hollywood, which Masefield said was kept specially for film use. He had seen one shot of a film introducing lions and Christians in the Roman arena. The lions were trained not to eat people, only to look fierce, but, he said, the Christians in this particular film would have put any healthy lion off.
We went into lunch – had some fricassee, very well cooked, accompanied by vegetables and ‘delights’ as Masefield called them. These ‘delights’ were pecan nuts and raisins. During lunch Masefield told me how he had hung round Swinburne’s door at Putney as a young man to see the poet – a queer figure with an aureole of red hair, tripping up Putney Hill. He asked, what did I think of Swinburne! I said I appreciated his technique but could not really extend my enjoyment
beyond the words. He said, to the young poets at the end of the last century, Swinburne seemed to have released the language – he could do anything with language.
Meanwhile, I was feeling rather cold. We were all three provided with a black shiny round oil stove, reaching about 2 ft. But the other side was cold. Anyway, we returned to the smaller drawing-room after eating Christmas pudding which M. said he hoped was my first time this year. There in the smaller room, we had coffee which M. poured and served; and he was very assiduous in pressing me to further ‘delights’ – fruit, sweets, etc.
Other things he had told me during this time were: that he couldn’t get beyond a few pages of Wuthering Heights, although he admired what Rossetti had said of it – ‘The characters speak English but the scene is apparently laid in Hell.’ Jane Eyre, he said, was considered a wicked book in his youth and his sister was forbidden to read it. He believed, he said, that he read a lot of books in his youth which would have been forbidden him ‘had they known’; he told me, too, that he thought the present poor sales of poetry were due to the high prices of the books. He considered that the theory was wrong which attributed the unpopularity of poetry to inferior work by present-day poets, for, he said, the public for poetry has actually increased; Yeats, he said, estimated the British poetry-reading public at 4,000. To-day, there are one million BBC listeners to poetry programmes.
I left him at 2 p.m. – his car was waiting to take me into Oxford. I left him with a feeling of unexpected warmth. He had given me two of his photographs and his ‘Book of Both Sorts’ inscribed to me; and had said that he would give me every help with my book. A new autobiographical book by him is appearing in April – first in the Atlantic Monthly as a serial – but apart from my use of the material in this book, in ‘The Conway’ and ‘In the Mill’, he promised to ‘think up’ new material for me.
