Boswell is a stray—he arrived without antecedents and departed without descendants. Anyone who wishes to see the strain we feel before the blank page of veneration may examine the previously mentioned Symposium in honor of Eliot’s sixtieth birthday. This collection is one long stutter, not about Eliot’s greatness, but before the unique and almost revolutionary act of proclaiming this greatness in anything except an “objective” critical essay. From the first a profound inexperience is displayed in the very organization of the project; the editors have been so bold as to reveal the difference between the abstract request and the difficult response. The preface promises a personal book, private impressions, actual meetings and so on, but what we have is a group of essays which might, with a few exceptions, appear any time. The only rarity of the work is geographical: the comments by people who have not even met Eliot come not only from England and Europe, but from Bengal, Ceylon, and Greece. Perhaps there is another peculiarity—two of the essays are not primarily about Eliot, but about Pound and Irving Babbitt. No one would wish to see this sort of thing increased and multiplied. It is very clearly “against the grain.” The fear of toadying is so great nearly everyone celebrates Eliot’s birthday as he would celebrate his own, quietly, secretly, hardly mentioning it for fear someone would think he wanted something.
Recently, when Edmund Wilson’s “critical memoir” on Edna Millay appeared one heard some literary people expressing a giggly embarrassment. Watch out, there’s something personal here! We may breathlessly read this document, but we feel obliged in our critical souls to discount it. After all, Wilson seems to have had an “attachment” for his subject and literature is a court where personal knowledge keeps you off the jury.
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In the diary, the private journal, one is relieved of the problem of seeming to debase himself in an undemocratic way before his equals or superiors, but another and more crushing burden of conscience cramps the fingers. This is the fear of outrageous vanity, of presuming to offer simply one’s own ideas and moods, speaking in one’s natural voice, which may appear—any number of transgressive adjectives are exact: boastful, presumptive, narcissistic, indulgent. There is no doubt that the diarist is the most egotistical of beings; he quite before our eyes ceases to take himself with that grain of salt which alone makes clever people bearable. Even the most gifted of men must in his own circle be “just like everyone else,” not standing upon his accomplishments, but putting them aside like an old smoking jacket worn in private. The unhesitating self-regard of Gide’s Journals would involve us in so much pain, so great an effort to strike the right note between merely rattling away on “trivialities” and recording “serious” feelings that it will hardly seem worth the while to most exceptional writers. Amateurs, like Pepys, not really writers at all, have the advantage. Our most interesting American and English journals are usually short essays or narratives on various themes, composed with the care, craft, and solemnity of any other public performance; too much of the free, flowing “I” is bad taste. (On this question of the modesty we value so highly, I have heard an extremely intelligent Englishman say that E. M. Forster’s relative lack of productivity was due to his not wanting to “lord it over” some of his old and dear friends by constantly and successfully appearing before the public as a novelist. Already, with Forster’s reputation, things were bad enough!) In the private journal, that inscrutable scribbler, Boswell, again comes to mind. He cared terribly about literature and was at great pains to polish his style, but fortunately Boswell never got the idea. He wrote as an amateur, giving off accounts of himself so vivid and outrageous one would believe them written by an enemy, if it were not clear at every turn that they are composed with adoration: Boswell’s own matchless enthusiasm for his adventures and thoughts. There are enough hints to show how tedious Boswell would have been as a self-conscious English man of letters, in good command of himself and his reputation, thoughtful of the decencies, of pride, of moderation. In spite of his efforts to achieve these qualities, Boswell hadn’t the vaguest notion what they were about. There is something nearly insane in his spontaneity.
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The hommage and an individual’s account of his own nature and life are interesting, but they have hardly any of that sinful appeal of those conversations, moments in the lives of famous or infamous persons, taken down and arranged by another. The purpose of the hommage is to praise, the usual practice of the diarist is to look inward; but the memoir is concerned with the external, meant to reveal, to pin down others. Unless one has met a number of famous people or endured an historic moment, he cannot in the fullest sense even write his memoirs—“Memoirs of a Nobody,” the title signifies an irony. The art of presenting, analyzing, recording living persons is, with us, protected and isolated by countless moral spears and spikes. The very fact that one is in a position to observe for posterity is all the more reason why he should decently refuse to do so. The motives behind this form of historical writing are felt to be unwholesome.
Drummond’s Conversations with Ben Jonson are a very queer moment in our literature. Still, surpassingly strange as these conversations are, they are extremely “English.” They are brief—one doesn’t go too far in laboring to preserve even what such a man as Ben Jonson said; people will think you have nothing else to do. Their “manliness” and “objectivity” are great; nothing feminine or gushingly interested like Boswell is involved because Drummond and Jonson did not even like each other! Drummond thought Jonson “a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others,” and was not disqualified as a disinterested recorder by even so much as a high opinion of Jonson’s literary work since he believed this man “excelleth only in a translation.” Jonson, as a guest, could not proceed without hesitation to name what he thought of Drummond and so confined himself to the mild grumble that his host’s verses “smelled too much of the Schools.” It is not hard to imagine what Jonson truly thought of Drummond when we read what he had to say these evenings about absent contemporaries: Donne, for not keeping the accent, deserved hanging; Daniel was jealous of him [Jonson]; Drayton feared him; Beaumont “loved too much himself and his own verses”; Raleigh employed the best wits in England to write his history; Sir Philip Sidney had pimples; of his own wife, well, “five years he had not bedded with her.” Even if we did not know Jonson to be a great and lovable genius, a profound and generous critic elsewhere, we could say at least that his remarks have a quality dear to us, honesty. Jonson is aware, with his violent outspokenness, of a kind of need to remind the listener of this trait; he says, “of all the styles he loved most to be named honest.” Having thus enlisted our certainty that he is no flatterer, he then, complex being, falls into a terrible error: he says that of his honesty he “hath one hundred letters so naming him.” After this we are immediately led back to a bit of sympathy for the irritated Drummond. A gentleman must right things in such unmanageable cases. These conversations are altogether weird.
The nearest thing in English to the Goncourts is De Quincey—his extraordinary impressions of the Lake Poets, which can hardly be excelled for style, brilliance of observation, skill in narration, and for overwhelming psychological wisdom. However, they are not much like the Goncourts because of their unique tenderness and their striking innocence of worldliness. Grasmere is one thing, Paris another; in Paris you dine with Gautier at the Princess Mathilde’s, here you walk twenty miles in the rain with Dorothy and William Wordsworth. The lonely hills nourish eccentricity, not scandal. Noble and loving as they are, De Quincey’s impressions provoked resentment in Wordsworth, Southey, and those of Coleridge’s relatives living at the time of publication. They do indeed have their tragic moments: that horrible lodging in London where Coleridge lay in the pain and confusion of laudanum, wretchedly facing his series of lectures at the Royal Institute. They do not lack comedy, either. De Quincey adored Wordsworth, still, “useful as they proved themselves, the Wordsworthian legs were certainly not ornamental.” And then t
his distinguished poet also had a remarkable narrowness and droop about the shoulders which caused Dorothy, walking behind him, to exclaim, “Is it possible—can that be William? How very mean he looks!” Southey may have felt his calm, regular habit of life, his immense energy, his library of beautifully bound books were a bit too faithfully described by De Quincey; the description suggests an overgrowth of secondary literary powers which crowd out the more messy ones of the first magnitude. Nevertheless the genius of everyone, and most of all of De Quincey himself, is brilliantly served by these essays. We would not for anything be without that picture of Wordsworth cutting the pages of one of Southey’s lovely books with a greasy butter knife.
In De Quincey and Boswell’s Johnson there is hardly a hint of “sex”—the subjects are all extremely eccentric in their lack of concentration on this instinct. Our own age is even more prudish in this respect; conversational and fictional freedom has increased, but in memoirs and portraits the license has been nearly revoked so that one gets round-about psychoanalytical hints based upon facts which are not revealed. It would be very difficult for us to write, without somehow turning it into an ambiguity or a joke, “At last I have met André Gide,” but we can hardly imagine the malice of writing, “I have met Gide, but he was distracted by the sight of a beautiful young boy on the beach . . .” An interesting scene of this sort occurs in Roger Martin du Gard. He says that he showed his diary to Gide and Gide was fascinated by it. Spender’s friendly and very circumspect portraits of living people were by some considered “scandalous.” An author would probably be outlawed for keeping in his mind, to say nothing of his journal, the following quotation from Flaubert found in the Goncourt work:
When I was young my vanity was such that if I found myself in a brothel with friends, I would choose the ugliest girl and would insist upon lying with her before them all without taking the cigar out of my mouth. It was no fun at all for me; I did it for the gallery.
The peculiar sanctity that surrounds our image of Flaubert, the unequaled purity of the man and his art, are not altered by this naked bit of anecdote.
Frank Harris, who clearly modeled his volumes on the Goncourts’, is, one gathers, either in oblivion or, when remembered, in disrepute. This ineffable being has certain qualifications as a “portraitist,” but they are nearly all erased by his incurable English, or American, moralizing. Harris is extremely sensitive to an “opportunity”; at a meeting he approaches the celebrity with the dignified and plausible expectancy of a relative at a promising deathbed. He does not pretend to be disinterested, or himself a mere nothing; but he can say in all honesty that he cares. And this is true: he is passionately interested in famous people. His “coverage” is wide and international; his narration of anecdote and description of character are entertaining, even if he does like to frill the edges with “winebearers at the banquet of life,” and to add all sorts of conversational pockets which seem designed merely to repeat his own name. “Do you see that, Frank?” or “I will tell you a story, Frank.” Harris’s great trouble is that he never misses a chance to point out a “flaw” in his subject’s discourse. One gets not only Shaw’s very interesting claim for his own dramatic Caesar over Shakespeare’s, but Harris’s long-winded defense of Shakespeare against Shaw. Harris wants you to know he will not hesitate to seek out the great and will not allow the greatest of them to get by with “nonsense.” Without indicating his refusal to agree or to practice an amiable silence, perhaps he could not have justified his exorbitant pursuit. This is very nearly fatal both for the drama and the humor of his portraits. Here is a bit of nightmare dialogue from the Goncourts, the kind of entry that gives a frightening life to their record:
Taine: “. . . In the town of Angers, they keep such a close watch on women there is no breath of scandal about a single one of them.”
Saint-Victor: “Angers? But they are all pederasts. . . .”
Harris would almost certainly have followed this mad moment with: “Permit me, but I have made a special trip to Angers and both of you are stupidly wrong.”
Should anyone in English wish to rival the Goncourts? Far from laboring to add more to this kind of “history,” perhaps we should find the enjoyment of the Goncourt classic a guilty passion. Henry James was deeply shocked by the appearance of this work. It seemed to him an appalling occupation, every instance of it, from the brothers’ account of their contemporaries to Edmond’s notes on the death of Jules. Their carrying on the journal is “a very interesting and remarkable fact,” but “it has almost a vulgarly usual air in comparison with the circumstance that one of them has judged best to give the document to the light.” James cannot abide these “demoralized investigators,” he is horrified by their picture of a grumpy and petty Saint-Beuve and points out with a cry that the thirty volumes of Saint-Beuve’s Causeries du lundi “contain a sufficiently substantial answer to their account of the figure he cut when they dined with him as his invited guests or as fellow-members of a brilliant club.” James is not only solicitous for the artists, but for the Goncourts’ maid whose bitter adventures are related, and for certain women of the world: “If Madame de Païva was good enough to dine, or anything else, with, she was good enough either to speak of without brutality or to speak of not at all.” And the Princess Mathilde: “He stays in her house for days, for weeks together, and then portrays for our entertainment her person, her clothes, her gestures . . . relating anecdotes at her expense . . . the racy expressions that passed her own lips.” James has, from my reading of the charming entries on the Princess Mathilde, a really cloistered notion of “racy expressions,” but his objections are not trifling. They are painfully serious and worthy, as one must recognize even when he has just closed his copy of the Journals and pronounced them a delight. All of the people are now dead and those who do not survive by their art or historical significance are dead completely, except as they live on for the occasional Goncourt fan or in other documents of the period. Some lively creatures would, no doubt, choose immortality on any terms rather than face the utter oblivion of their names. Yet we do not know this for a certainty; the question cannot even be truly put to the sufferer, since the permanence of a portrait, vicious or pleasing, cannot be known for a long time. A shrewd person might even say: If the book is a masterpiece. I don’t mind being atrociously present, because even mediocrities or cads, brilliantly drawn, have a kind of grandeur—but if it is second-rate, leave me out!
In England and America where the temptation to the direct use of actual personages is so buried in hesitation, where so much seems to forbid, the practice may be attended by malice and deliberate distortion; some goddess of revenge and brutality may in fact hold the hand of the muse of history. Nevertheless, writers and readers alike have a rich interest in the living personality, an interest which does not blush even before the squalid or ludicrous revelation. If we do not practice the memoir or diary with unfaltering confidence, we have the roman à clef and satires like Pope’s. These forms are allowed to be far more brutal than mere reportage; in the latter a certain body of fact must be observed; accuracy is all. In the novel or satire, every effort is made to identify without actually naming the fleshly reality, but once the identity is clear no restraints at all are put upon the free exercise of a malicious imagination. The author can pick and choose as he likes, exaggerate, invent; indeed he is obliged to swell here and shrink there from the necessity of creating a “character,” which cannot have the exact fullness and queerness of life, but must be “exposed” more neatly, according to the demands of art. This method is less useful for “history,” but it is brilliantly effective in inflicting an injury upon the living. The poor victim cannot say he has been falsely reported, since it is his very soul which is being examined; grimy motives and degrading weaknesses he has never expressed are gaily attributed to him by the satirist. Almost anyone, in his lifetime, would prefer the “pinning down” of the Goncourts to the crucifixion of “The Dunciad.”
Yet even with
contemporary silence the sensitive celebrity cannot keep posterity in hand. In a highly industrialized society “research” is an honorable calling. Politeness and decency have left us nothing of Emily Dickinson’s swoons or suspicious flutters, still ladies and gentlemen coming later can hypothecate depths of perverse commitment about which one can at best only be an agnostic—like the after life these hypotheses cannot be proved true or false from on-the-spot accounts. The scholar can do anything he likes with Walt Whitman, or rest Herman Melville on a bed of Oedipal nails that would puncture the sleep of the most thick-skinned artist. Posterity, dipping into Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times “Interviews” and so on, will find a mute and inglorious Faulkner, a kittenish Marianne Moore, a sober Dylan Thomas—perhaps there will not even be a word, but only a picture memorializing an Allen Tate of granite solemnity and dignity, a mutely beautiful Katherine Anne Porter, a schoolmaster with a beard named Randall Jarrell. From our serious periodicals it will be learned that our literary men, and also those of the past, had no life at all: they lived and died as a metaphor. But living people, even thousands upon thousands of students, know our writers, and know them first-hand, to be fantastically interesting and—who would dispute it?—often fantastic. Our squeamishness and glorification of privacy may be paid for by a blank. Even a bureaucrat or a play producer might, if he gave thought to it, hesitate to enter history by way of those “profiles” and cover-stories which have become an unyielding bore of joshing flattery, whose only purpose may be to keep literary lawyers busy and neighborly researchers employed in the piling up of a benign lump of fact.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 3
