In my own books surviving there is a mid-century Modern Library anthology edited by Conrad Aiken, which includes Robinson’s “The Man Against the Sky.” My sister and I were taught to be careful with books, not to mark in them or crease their pages, or to put them face down for fear of breaking their spines. Just so this book has painfully little to tell me now as to what excited my senses of poetry over fifty years ago. Very occasionally there is a modest check against a title (in pencil) and, even more rarely, an underscoring or line in the margin. As I recall, Hart Crane is given attention, and Marsden Hartley, and particularly Robinson and this one poem. I see that I was caught by the image, and the scale of its assertion, somehow more substantial in my thinking than the existential world I otherwise tried then to apprehend. I could find the same ground in Dostoyevsky and Lawrence, a personal, physical sense of things, which provoked even as it evaded all the usual meanings. Robinson’s rhetoric, his phrasing, pitch and cadence, had a particularity seeming to come from his own determination, a self-willed, self-taught character which moved me immensely. Of course, D. H. Lawrence had the same tone as did Hardy and Hart Crane. I deeply cared for those who had learned the hard way, so to speak, and for whom writing seemed a necessity against all odds.
The Second World War was a demanding time in which to come of age, and equally so its aftermath. It seemed we were all reading Sartre, Camus, leavened with Kafka and Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures. My own delight was also Valery’s Monsieur Teste— and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, an existential handbook if ever there was one. Then there was Céline, and again Dostoyevsky, whose Notes from Underground was first identified for me by Charles Olson.
The world was not very accommodating of “humanness,” albeit we seemed to overwhelm it just by our conduct and numbers. My schooling had begun with the Great Chain of Being firmly in place. Now it seemed humans ranked well below cockroaches and rats if literal survival were to be the measure. So, to that person I was, these lines concluding “The Man Against the Sky” seemed very apt and very true:
What have we seen beyond our sunset fires
That lights again the way by which we came?
Why pay we such a price, and one we give
So clamoringly, for each racked empty day
That leads one more last human hope away,
As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes
Our children to an unseen sacrifice?
If after all that we have lived and thought,
All comes to Nought,—
If there be nothing after Now,
And we be nothing anyhow,
And we know that,—why live?
’Twere sure but weaklings’ vain distress
To suffer dungeons where so many doors
Will open on the cold eternal shores
That look sheer down
To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
Where all who know may drown.
A poem of Malcolm Lowry’s begins something like, “As the dead end of each drear day draws near … ” There are also Samuel Beckett’s magnificently pessimistic poems. But no one can manage such a curiously vulnerable and shopworn rhetoric as does Robinson and make such ungainsayable sense, all in the determination, it would seem, of a confident depression—but that is not the right word? He is absolutely a writer, and it is the one thing he never yields, despite the circumstances into which, as “Miniver Cheevy,” he has been born—the death of his mother, the general despair, it would seem, of the whole family, the insistent pain of his damaged ear, the addicted brother, failing economics, desultory education, the isolation he experiences, somewhat as Marsden Hartley, whether in New York or Boston, or in Maine. The most happy circumstance appears to be his stays at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to which he returns year after year as to a homestead.
Robinson is five years older than Frost, born the same year as Edgar Lee Masters (1869), and four years younger than Yeats. Hardy is twenty-nine years older although the two are often thought of together. It’s Robinson who writes Frost in 1917, “In ‘Snow,’ ‘In the Home Stretch,’ ‘Birches,’ ‘The Hill Wife,’ and ‘The Road Not Taken’ you seem undoubtedly to have added something permanent to the world … ” His own success in the twenties is marked by the publication of Tristram (1927), together with the honors variously given him a few years before. His great popularity and the Pulitzer Prize awarded his collected poems (1921) would seem to argue a secure authority. But after his death in 1935 Frost increasingly occupies the situation of the “New England” poet, and Robinson, unfashionable by my generation and presumed as an echo of the late nineteenth century at best, expectably fades from view.
Yet his circumstances were so curious. What other American poet can one think of whose work is reviewed by an American president, who then sees to it that he, the poet, is comfortably employed? Here is Yvor Winters’s summary:
In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt became interested in Robinson’s work, which had been called to his attention by his son, Kermit, then a pupil at Groton. Roosevelt, after trying to persuade Robinson to accept several positions, succeeded in getting him a place as special agent of the Treasury at $2,000 per year. Roosevelt invited Robinson to the White House and talked with him at length; he later wrote an article in praise of Robinson’s poems, for the Outlook and persuaded Scribner’s to reissue The Children of the Night. For his temerity in writing a critical article, the president was generally abused by the literary experts of the period, and Robinson’s poetry was belittled by them; but Roosevelt must have accomplished more toward assisting Robinson at this juncture with regard both to his reputation and to his personal life than anyone else had done. It is curious to note that Roosevelt found “Luke Havergal” and “Two Gardens in Linndale” obscure, although fortunately for Robinson he shared with the critics of a later generation a liking for poetry which he could not understand.
—Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1946
Winters’s interest is much to the point. His own adamant standards, both as poet and critic, were the terror of his time, and I well recall how he assayed to cut William Carlos Williams down to size and with confident judgment dismissed Hart Crane’s last poem “The Broken Tower” as ill done. His discussion of Robinson, written for New Directions’ The Makers of Modern Literature series, is compact and provocative, and it is certainly forthright (“ … but as I have already said, he devoted himself mainly to long poems, for which even in the years of his greatest achievement he had shown a marked incapacity, and he wrote too much and apparently published all that he wrote”).
Edwin Arlington Robinson. 1930. The Granger Collection, New York.
It is hard to argue with him now. What Winters proposes as Robinson’s virtues states my own sense of them very clearly: “the plain style, the rational statement, the psychological insight, the subdued irony, the high seriousness and the stubborn persistence.” Fifty years later these qualities are even more emphasized, and a poem which Winters speaks of as “one of the greatest short poems in the language” still intrigues me with its confusing mastery of a nearly frivolous form and rhythmic pattern, together with a pace and rhyming of such absolute and intimate integrity it cannot ever be abstracted or forgotten.
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him …
—from “Eros Turannos”
But I cannot spoil the haunting story. The ending is just that, neither an explanation nor a conclusion—simply there. I find myself again crying, face wet with tears. Is it Maine I am talking about, or that he’s talking about, or a common sound, or feeling, or a way these words echo now in mind, or just that it is, life is, like this, an endless ambiva
lence one will never do more than recognize, at best, far too late? I heard this all so very long ago, and he was the one who told me.
… Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
—Ibid.
OLD POEMS
One wishes the herd still wound its way
to mark the end of the departing day
or that the road were a ribbon of moonlight
tossed between something cloudy (?) or that the night
were still something to be walked in like a lake
or that even a bleak stair down which the blind
were driven might still prove someone’s fate—
and pain and love as always still unkind.
My shedding body, skin soft as a much worn
leather glove, head empty as an emptied winter pond,
collapsing arms, hands looking like stubble, rubble,
outside still those barns of my various childhood,
the people I still hold to, mother, my grandfather
grandmother, my sister, the frames of necessary love,
the ones defined me, told me who I was or what I am
and must now learn to let go of, give entirely away
There cannot be less of me than there was,
not less of things I’d thought to save, or forgot,
placed in something I lost, or ran after,
saw disappear down a road itself is no longer there.
Pump on, old heart. Stay put, vainglorious blood,
red as the something something.
“Evening comes and comes … ” What
was that great poem about the man against
the sky just at the top of the hill
with the last of the vivid sun still behind him
and one couldn’t tell
whether he now went up or down?
Herman Melville. Circa 1885. The Granger Collection, New York.
Melville and the Art of Saying No
Jim Lewis
IS THERE A BETTER BOOK that’s worse? Is there a masterpiece so unmasterful, so little of a piece? The Confidence Man is a catalogue of failings. The true wonder of the thing is not why it was neglected for so long, but how it ever got published at all.
Even the most basic standards of novel-writing are grossly unmet. The plot, such as it is, is gimmicky and simplistic: on board a Mississippi steamship called the Fidèle, a man gets himself up in various guises and tries, with varying degrees of success, to con a few of his fellows. The anecdotes that flesh out this minor conceit are episodic, repetitious and incomplete. What’s more, the whole thing is lopsided and disproportionate. Some incidents are so brief that they’re over almost as soon as they’re begun. Others are interminable. The author digresses for chapters at a time, losing himself in allegories without meaning, in disquisitions without argument or conclusion; the result is a tediousness and an obscurity so pronounced that he feels compelled, at various moments in what passes for the book’s narrative, to stop and explicitly defend himself against charges of incompetence.
The charges stand. The title character, for example, is entirely protean and inscrutable. His success at self-disguise is improbable and unconvincing. In fact, the elusiveness of his outer life is matched only by the vacuity of his inner one: he has no history, no personality, no motivation, no goal. He is inconsistent, and not even consistently inconsistent: in an early chapter, the Black Guinea, himself the first appearance of the confidence man (unless we count the deaf mute who appears at the book’s opening—should we count the deaf mute?), lists eight men on board the boat who will vouch for him. In the course of the book, six of them appear, each one another manifestation of the same wily character. Obviously an attempt at subtle structuring.—But … what about the other two? The man in the violet robe? The man in the yellow vest? They’re never mentioned again.
The other characters are simple and bland, and they’re drawn in the crudest possible way. Each is described according to a single, unmistakable trait, a tic—a habit of coughing, a foppish air, a violent temper. They’re straight men, puppets who pop up on the stage, say their little piece, then disappear again.
The prose itself is often bland and mannered, sapped of all vigor by Melville’s evasiveness, his perverse indirection. He continually indulges in negatives, double negatives, hedged and qualified double negatives; he backs into every description like a man trying to perjure himself without getting caught. There is a passage in which one of the confidence man’s first victims, a merchant named Roberts, reacts to an entreaty: “the merchant, though not used to being very indiscreet, yet being not entirely inhumane, remained not entirely unmoved.” Other characters are ‘not untouched,’ ‘not unaware,’ ‘not unselfpossessed,’ ‘not uncongenial’ and so on. Four years previously Melville had created another voided character in Bartleby, whose perfect and gentle refrain of “I prefer not to” contained a negating power so immense that even Wall Street—especially Wall Street—was helpless before it. The Confidence Man is Bartleby, the Narrator.
Everywhere Melville flaunts what his book is not, he lavishes attention on characters who don’t really exist and dwells rapturously on events that hardly occur at all. He’s circular, evasive and flippant, and he can’t resist advertising as much. One chapter is entitled, “Worth the consideration of those to whom it may prove worth considering”; another is called “Moot points touching the late Colonel John Moredock”; a third proclaims itself “Very charming,” though it’s essentially charmless.
And yet he seems completely unembarrassed. He simply pushes on ahead—did he revise the book even once?—until he gets bored, at which point he ends more or less in mid-anecdote, with the line, “Something further may follow of this Masquerade.” There’s no reason to believe he ever intended to write a sequel.
I love the book, more than Moby-Dick, more than any native novel I can think of. Melville is the muse of my America, and The Confidence Man is my vade mecum. I’ve read it over and over, and sometimes tried to imitate it. And yet …
Is there a more lighthearted and amusing tale that’s meaner and more misanthropic? It’s a Barnum of a book (the circus man’s own memoirs, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, had been published just two years before, and was already vastly popular). Hardly a character escapes it without suffering Melville’s sly and cheerful contempt: the rich and the poor, businessmen, soldiers, doctors, invalids and Indian-haters. Emerson and Thoreau appear in the guise of a dour mystic named Winsome, and Egbert, his callow disciple.
Only the confidence man himself is allowed any dignity, and then only because he is corrupt. He does not, after all, scruple to gull the weak-minded or the infirm, the credulous or the true. Nor is he motivated by anything so mortal as the love of money; he expends enormous effort and wit in order to cheat a barber out of the price of a shave. No, it’s the principle that appeals to him, it’s a point he feels like proving: that men are blind and weak and stupid, vain and stingy and easy to rob, and that he is Scratch and made to rob them.
From The New York Herald, July 8, 1849:
ARREST OF THE CONFIDENCE MAN
For the last few months a man has been traveling about the city, known as the “Confidence Man”; that is, he would go up to a perfect stranger in the street, and being a man of genteel appearance, would easily command an interview. Upon this interview he would say, after some little conversation, “have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until tomorrow?”; the stranger, at this novel request, supposing him to be some old acquaintance, not at the moment recollected, allows him to take the watch, thus placing “confidence” in the honesty of the stranger, who walks off laughing …
That is, by the way, where the phrase “con man” comes from; the perpetrator was named William Thompson, “said to be a graduate of the college at Sing Sing.” (In times before, such a man would have been referred to as a “Jeremy Diddler”; Poe has a rather wan sketch called “Diddling Considered as one of the Exact Sciences.”) But he bequeathed us more than a tag, because in that passage lies the origin of American humor, or at any rate a substantial strand thereof, and if you listen very closely, you can still hear the original confidence man’s laughter, faintly echoing in the city. It is an unmistakable sound; it’s the amusement of a man walking away from a mark, the joy of a demon who has just rooked an innocent, and then presented the act as a happy affront to the idea of human will and ability.
To share in that laughter was Melville’s great act of brilliance and bravery, the more so because it demolished the myths that had accrued to him over the preceding decades. The author of The Confidence Man was not Melville the bear, the adventurer, the bestseller and the purveyor of theodicies, not the mammoth man who made mammoth masterpieces. This Melville deserted the first whaleboat he signed onto, and took part in a mutiny aboard the second: he was a Timon of the New World, a court jester in a country without a Court.
It is, then, a very American form of humor that he proposes, underwritten by the pessimism that lurks behind our optimism, by our fatalism and our rage. As comedy it relies—as all comedy does—on a certain surprise, but the surprise comes from what does not happen—from the violence of what does not happen, and with it the sudden realization that nothing is going to get better, that the situation at hand is never going to improve, nothing will change and you will never win. On and on the routine runs, spiraling downwards towards a distant darkness; and just when you think that some form of redemption must be in the offing, just when you allow yourself a little hope—down it drops a little more. You can see that sort of comic abjection in Buster Keaton’s face; you can hear it in Richard Pryor’s voice; you can find it in the later performances of Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman, the ones they did just before they died, where the comedy is so desperate that it’s impossible to tell whether they’re kidding or not. It’s the humor that comes from being hounded by failure in a culture which is notoriously afraid of such a thing, until there’s nothing left to do but turn around and laugh.
Tributes Page 5
