Though these dizzying juxtapositions seem to have the flat-footed out-of-the-blue energy of the Cat in the Hat himself, they are tempered by the term-paper sobriety and abundance of Cott’s thousand-and-one apt quotations, which pepper the text everywhere. To wit: “It is incorrect to think fantasy is useful only to the poet. This is an insipid prejudice! It is useful even in mathematics—even differential and integral calculus could not have been discovered without it. Fantasy is a quality of the highest importance.” Thus Nikolai Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, who also turns up in the chapter on Dr. Seuss.
I admit that Lenin as an authority on the mind’s free play made me laugh out loud: the consequence, no doubt, of an insipid prejudice. Yet these quotations, inspirational and explicative, are both the pestilence and the unresolved purpose of this earnest volume, inserted at the most awkward moments conceivable, with the most embarrassingly omniscient lead-ins—“As Yeats said,” “The fourteenth-century Japanese writer Kenko comments,” “The folklorist Richard M. Dorson states,” “In the New Testament we read,” “In a famous letter that Mozart wrote,” “Selma G. Lanes tells,” “It reminds me of an extraordinary statement by Meister Eckhart,” “As a Gnostic text says,” “There’s a story about a Taoist saint who,” etc., etc. It is all serious and clumsy, and pancultural and pantheist, but—after a while—not an occasion for raillery. Behind the unflinching waterfall of Cott’s citations there can be descried the bright phantom of a passionate aspiration. It is to write a book (this is not yet the one) about imagination expressed as universal myth; about storytellers as Primal Explainers, as priests of the Old, the First, Religion; about fairies as fallen gods and goddesses; and, more than anything, about fallen belief, diminished now to the shiver of enchantment. Just such a book has already been written, though by somebody else, and a generation ago; it is C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, a remarkable meditation on childhood longing for magic potencies and sensations.
Pipers at the Gates of Dawn (the title is from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: “Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger than the music is sweet!”) is saturated with that longing—or, rather, with a longing for such a longing. Meanwhile, and instead, there are the interviews. But these are too maneuvered, too anticipatory, too adulatory, in fact too “informative,” to catch the elusive heel of imagination on the fly. Only the wonderfully thumping Opies manage to take hold of the interview format as a declarative artifact of their own making. The result is a cascade of family background, personal history, rich accounts of their astonishing compilations of nursery rhymes and street chants, and so on: they are anthropologists in the continually replenishing country of children. And because they are scholars of lore rather than shamans or inventors, with the kind of capacious authority that objectivity confers, the long chapter on the Opies is the most gratifying and the most successful.
The interview with P. L. Travers, progenitrix (she refuses the word “creator”) of Mary Poppins, on the other hand, is dumbfounding—designed, it would seem, by Dr. Seuss in an atypically mean, but representatively coarse, mood. (There is a coarseness to Seuss deeper than the jollifications of the intended coarseness: a touch of self-institutionalized hard sell—or hard soul.) “I recall your saying,” Cott tells Travers, “‘I’m a mere kitchenmaid in the house of myth and poetry.’” And Travers replies, “Yes, indeed. . . . or rather that is what I would like to be: to take a stoup of wine to Homer or polish Pallas Athene’s sandals!” And adds soon after: “I’m happy to be poured. Happy to be a flagon that is poured out.” Cott, citing an ancient Christian Gnostic text, eggs her on: “It’s a very deep passage, and I don’t think I understand it fully.” Travers: “Nor do I. I wait to be told. . . . Having written certain things, I sometimes think to myself, ‘How did she learn that? It’s so true.’” Cott: “You mean Mary Poppins?” Travers: “No, P. L. Travers. And I long to meet her. And then I wonder: Am I she?” By the next page Cott is exclaiming, “You yourself have such intense blue eyes!” A stoup, so to speak, of oil. Earlier, Cott points out to Travers that M.P., the initials of Mary Poppins, can be found in Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode: “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!”
Whereupon Travers, enraptured, cries out, “Oh, I never thought of that! How very perceptive of you! I’m reminded of a letter I received from a young woman threatened by a fatal disease who apparently had been deeply affected by Mary Poppins. . . . ‘Dear Mother Nature, thank you for altering my life. Dear Snowstorm, thank you for beautifying the world.’”
Ah, Holden Caulfield, you hardly knew your peril when you told us how badly you wanted to call up the author of any book that really knocked you out.
If it is unsettling to learn that Mary Poppins was born of a coy mind made coyer by exposure to Gurdjieff and “a Zen roshi,” as well as by a proclivity for the portentous paradox, then it is time to consider the engaging visions of William Steig—e.g., Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a loving fable of eerie loneliness, with a happy ending that teaches the meaning of salvational blessing (I begin to sound like one of Cott’s citations); its “energy,” we are told, comes from Wilhelm Reich’s orgone theories. Steig has sat in that box—the magically scientific Reichian “accumulator.” After which, it is a relief to find that Astrid Lindgren’s powers (Pippi Longstocking) reverberate out of a spunky childhood recaptured, and Maurice Sendak’s (Outside Over There) out of a ruminating childhood regenerated, with an admixture of Mozart. (Cott to Sendak: “‘D. H. Lawrence,’ I interject, ‘used to describe the pregnant mother as feeling at one with the world.’” Sendak, unindulgent: “The maven on how women felt!”) The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, more nuanced than the Opies, is able to represent an unfamiliar culture with robust penetration; his command of Igbo belief, and his percipient exposition of its moral and metaphorical values, have a firm essaylike influence over the softness of the loquacious interview form. Like the Opies, he does not wholly fall prey to it.
It isn’t that Cott’s interviews are not, by and large, worthy journalism. It doesn’t matter that an interview, framed not by the dream of the artist but by an exterior summarizer and instigator, will inexorably reduce the most impressive gift to a kind of pot-boilerdom. The chaotic though interesting difficulty with Pipers at the Gates of Dawn is that it is so clearly short-circuited by being what it is, instead of what it longed to be—an instance of its own sublime themes, a book about enchantment and awe. Cott’s Niagara-floods of quotations are so many prooftexts of the reach of his desire.
Cott, citing Picasso: “Any man can make the sun into a yellow ball. Ah, but to make a yellow ball into the sun!” Any reporter can make literature into subject matter. Ah, but to make subject matter into literature!
Published as “Talks with the Gods Who Lure Children,” The New York Times Book Review, May 1, 1983
A Short Note on “Chekhovian”
“Chekhovian.” An adjective that had to be invented for the new voice Chekhov’s genius breathed into the world—elusive, inconclusive, flickering; nuanced through an underlying disquiet, though never morbid or disgruntled; unerringly intuitive, catching out of the air mute inferences, glittering motes, faint turnings of the heart, tendrils thinner than hairs, drift. But Chekhov’s art is more than merely Chekhovian. It is dedicated to explicit and definitive portraiture and the muscular trajectory of whole lives. Each story, however allusive or broken off, is nevertheless exhaustive—like the curve of a shard that implies not simply the form of the pitcher entire, but also the thirsts of its shattered civilization.
And yet it is an odd misdirection that we have come to think of Chekhov mainly as a writer of hints and significant fragments, when so much of his expression is highly colored and abundant, declaratively open, even noisy. He is not reticent, and his people are often charged with conviction, sometimes ludicrously, sometimes with the serious nobility of Chekhov himself. But even when his characters strike us as unwholesome, or exasperating, or enervated, or only perverse (especial
ly then), we feel Chekhov’s patience, his clarity—his meticulous humanity, lacking so much as a grain of malevolence or spite. At bottom Chekhov is a writer who has flung his soul to the side of pity, and sees into the holiness and immaculate fragility of the hidden striver below. Perhaps this is why we know that when we are with Chekhov, we are with a poet of latency. He is an interpreter of the underneath life, even when his characters appear to be cut off from inwardness.
He is also an artist of solidity and precision. Here is Aksinya (from “In the Ravine”): “a handsome woman with a good figure, who wore a hat and carried a parasol on holidays, got up early and went to bed late, and ran about all day long, picking up her skirts and jingling her keys, going from the granary to the cellar and from there to the shop.” That is the vigor of outerness; Chekhov is as much a master of the observed as he is of the unobserved. And he is, besides, the source of unusual states of wisdom, astonishing psychological principles. He can transfigure latency into drama, as in “Ward No. Six,” which belongs with Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” among the great expositions of self-disclosure. And this too is Chekhov: he teaches us us.
Published by the Ecco Press, in Volume 5 of its Chekhov short stories series, The Tales of Chekhov, 1985
Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters
For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups—comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that. . . . one might have crossed an ocean.
C. P. SNOW, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
Disraeli in his novel Sybil spoke of “two nations,” the rich and the poor. After the progress of more than a century, the phrase (and the reality) remains regrettably apt. But in the less than three decades since C. P. Snow proposed his “two cultures” thesis—the gap of incomprehension between the scientific and literary elites—the conditions of what we still like to call culture have altered so drastically that Snow’s arguments are mostly dissolved into pointlessness. His compatriot and foremost needier, the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis, had in any case set out to flog Snow’s hypothesis from the start. Snow, he said, “rides on an advancing swell of cliche,” “doesn’t know what literature is,” and hasn’t “had the advantage of an intellectual discipline of any kind.” And besides—here Leavis emitted his final boom—“there is only one culture.”
In the long run both were destined to be mistaken—Leavis perhaps more than Snow. In 1959, when Snow published The Two Cultures, we had already had well over a hundred years to get used to the idea of science as a multi-divergent venture—dozens and dozens of disciplines, each one nearly a separate nation with its own governance, psychology, entelechy. It might have been possible to posit, say, a unitary medical culture in the days when barbers were surgeons; but in recent generations we don’t expect our dentist to repair a broken kneecap, or our orthopedist to practice cardiology. And nowadays we are learning that an ophthalmologist with an understanding of the cornea is likely to be a bit shaky on the subject of the retina. Engineers are light-years from astrophysicists. Topology is distinct from topography, paleobotany from paleogeology. In reiterating that scientific culture is specialist culture—who doesn’t know this?—one risks riding an advancing swell of cliche. Yet science, multiplying, fragmented, in hot pursuit of split ends, is in a way a species of polytheism, or, rather, animism: every grain of matter, every path of conceptualization, has its own ruling spirit, its differentiated lawgiver and traffic director. Investigative diversity and particularizing empiricism have been characteristic of science since—well, since alchemy turned into physical chemistry (and lately into superconductivity); since the teakettle inspired the locomotive; since Icarus took off his wax wings to become Pan Am; since Archimedes stepped out of his tub into Einstein’s sea.
Snow was in command of all this, of course—he was pleased to identify himself as an exceptional scientist who wrote novels—and still he chose to make a monolith out of splinters. Why did he do it? In order to have one unanimity confront another. While it may have been a polemical contrivance to present a diversiform scientific culture as unitary, it was patently not wrong, thirty years ago, to speak of literary culture as a single force or presence. That was what was meant by the peaceable word “humanities.” And it was what Leavis meant, too, when he growled back at Snow that one culture was all there was worth having. “Don’t mistake me,” Leavis pressed, “I am not preaching that we should defy, or try to reverse, the accelerating movement of external civilization (the phrase sufficiently explains itself, I hope) that is determined by advancing technology. . . . What I am saying is that such a concern is not enough—disastrously not enough.” Not enough, he argued, for “a human future . . . in full intelligent possession of its full humanity.” For Leavis, technology was the mere outer rind of culture, and the job of literature (the hot core at the heart of culture) was not to oppose science but to humanize it. Only in Snow’s wretchedly deprived mind did literature stand apart from science; Snow hardly understood what literature was for. And no wonder: Snow’s ideas about literary intellectuals came, Leavis sneered, from “the reviewing in the Sunday papers.”
It has never been easy to fashion a uniform image of science—which is why we tend to say “the sciences.” But until not very long ago one could take it for granted (despite the headlong decline of serious high art) that there was, on the humanities side, a concordant language of sensibility, an embracing impulse toward integration, above all the conviction of human connectedness—even if that conviction occasionally partook of a certain crepuscular nostalgia we might better have done without. Snow pictured literature and science as two angry armies. Leavis announced that there was only one army, with literature as its commander in chief. Yet it was plain that both Leavis and Snow, for all their antagonisms, saw the kingdom of letters as an intact and enduring power.
This feeling for literary culture as a glowing wholeness—it was a feeling, a stirring, a flush of idealism—is now altogether dissipated. The fragrant term that encapsuled it—belles-lettres—is nearly archaic and surely effete: it smacks of leather tooling for the moneyed, of posturing. But it was once useful enough. “Belles-lettres” stood for a binding thread of observation and civilizing emotion. It signified not so much that letters are beautiful as that the house of letters is encompassingly humane and undivisive, no matter how severally its windows are shaped, or who looks out or in. Poets, scholars, journalists, librarians, novelists, playwrights, art critics, philosophers, writers for children, historians, political theorists, and all the rest, may have inhabited different rooms, differently furnished, but it was indisputably one house with a single roof and plenty of connecting doors and passageways. And sometimes—so elastic and compressive was the humanist principle—poet, scholar, essayist, philosopher, etc., all lived side by side in the same head. Seamlessness (even if only an illusion) never implied locked and separate cells.
And now? Look around. Now “letters” suggests a thousand enemy camps, “genres” like fortresses, professions isolated by crocodiled moats. The living tissue of intuition and inference that nurtured the commonalty of the humanities is ruptured by an abrupt invasion of specialists. In emulation of the sciences? But we don’t often hear of astronomers despising molecular biologists; in science, it may be natural for knowledge to run, like quicksilver, into crannies.
In the ex-community of letters, factions are in fashion, and the business of factions is to despise. Matthew Arnold’s mild and venerable dictum, an open-ended, open-armed definition of literature that clearly intends a nobility of inclusiveness—“the best that is known and thought in the world”—earns latter-day assaults and jeers. What can all that mean now but “canon,” and what can a received canon mean but reactionary, racist, sexist, elitist closure? Politics presses against disinterestedness; what claims to be intrin
sic is counted as no more than foregone conclusion. All categories are suspect, no category is allowed to display its wares without the charge of vested interest or ideological immanence. What Arnold called the play of mind is asked to show its credentials and prove its legitimacy. “Our organs of criticism,” Arnold complained in 1864 (a period as uninnocent as our own), “are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the second.”
And so it is with us. The culture of the humanities has split and split and split again, always for reasons of partisan ascendancy and scorn. Once it was not unusual for writers—Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Cather, Hemingway!—to turn to journalism for a taste of the workings of the world. Today novelists and journalists are alien breeds reared apart, as if imagination properly belonged only to the one and never to the other; as if society and instinct were designed for estrangement. The two crafts are contradictory even in method: journalists are urged to tell secrets in the top line; novelists insinuate suspensefully, and wait for the last line to spill the real beans. Dickens, saturated in journalism, excelled at shorthand; was a court reporter; edited topical magazines.
In the literary academy, Jacques Derrida has the authority that Duns Scotus had for medieval scholastics—and it is authority, not literature, that mainly engages faculties. In the guise of maverick or rebel, professors kowtow to dogma. English departments have set off after theory, and use culture as an instrument to illustrate doctrinal principles, whether Marxist or “French Freud.” The play of mind gives way to signing up and lining up. College teachers were never so cut off from the heat of poets dead or alive as they are now; only think of the icy distances separating syllables by, say, Marianne Moore, A. R. Ammons, May Swenson, or Amy Clampitt from the papers read at last winter’s Modern Language Association meeting—viz., “Written Discourse as Dialogic Interaction,” “Abduction, Transference, and the Reading Stage,” “The Politics of Feminism and the Discourse of Feminist Literary Criticism.”
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