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[1] SP 359-370 |
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Mr. F. V. Morley, with a misplaced sense of humour, has suggested that I write a fifty page preface to two hundred pages of contemporary poesy. This to me, who have for a quarter of a century contended that critics should know more and write less. No two hundred pages of cor.temporary poetry would sustain the demands I could make in half such a preface. I am more- over confining my selection to poems Britain has not accepted and in the main that the British literary bureaucracy does NOT want to have printed in England. I shall therefore write a preface mainly about something else. Mr. Eliot and I are in agreement, or `belong to the same school of critics', in so far as we both believe that existing works form a compiete order which is changed by the introduction of the `really new' work. His contempt for his readers has always been much greater than mine, by which I would indicate that I quite often write as if I expected my reader to use his intelligence, and count on its being fairly strong, whereas Mr. Eliot after enduring decennial fogs in Britain practically always writes as if for very very feeble and brittle mentalities, from whom he can expect neither resilience nor any faculty for seeing the import instead of the details or surfaces. When he talks of `commentation and elucidation' and of the `cor- rection of taste', I go into opposition, or rathet, having been there first, I note that if I was in any sense the revolution I have been fol- lowed by the counter-revolution. Damn your taste, I would like if possible to sharpen your perceptions, after which your taste can take care of itself. `Commentation' be damned. `Elucidation' can stand if it means `turn a searchlight on' something or preferably some work or author lying in shadow. Mr. Eliot's flattering obeisance to `exponents of criticism', wherein he says that he supposes they have not assumed that criticism is án `autotelic activity', seems to me so much apple-sauce. In so far as the bureaucracy of letters has considered their writing as anything more than a short cut to the feeding trough or a means of puffing up their personal importances, they have done little else for the past thirty years than boost the production of writing about writing, not only as autotelic, but as something which ought to receive more attention from the reading victim than the great books themselves. Granted that nobody ought to be such a presumptuous imbecile as to hold up the autotelic false horizon, Mr. Eliot describes a terrestrial paradise and not the de facto world, in which more immediate locus we observe a perpetual exchange of civilities between pulex, cimex, vermiformis, etc., each holding up his candle before the shrines of his similars. A process having no conceivable final limit and illustratable by my present activity: I mean on this very page engaging your attention while I talk about Mr. Eliot's essay about other essayists' essays. In the course of his eminently professorial volume he must have mentioned at least forty-five essayists whom tomorrow's readers will be most happy not to hear mentioned, but méntion of whom must have contributed enormously to Mr. Eliot's rise to his deserved position as arbiter of British opinion. KRINO `Existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves.' It would be healthier to use a zoological term rather than the word monument. It is much easier to think of the Odyssey or Le Testament or Catullus' Epithalamium as something living than as a series of cenotaphs. After all, Homer, Villon, Propertius, speak of the world as I know it, whereas Mr. Tennyson and Dr. Bridges did not. Even Dante and Guido with their so highly specialised culture speak of a part of life as I know it. ATHANATOS. However, accepting for the moment Mr. Eliot's monumental or architectural simile: the KRINO, `to pick out for oneself, choose, prefer' (page 381 my edition of Liddell and Scott) which seems to me the major job, is to determine, first, the main form and main proportions of that order of extant letters, to locate, first the greater pyramids and then, possibly, and with a decently proportioned emphasis, to con- sider the exact measurements of the stone-courses, layers, etc. Dryden gives T. S. E. a good club wherewith to smack Milton. But with a modicum of familiarity or even a passing acquaintance with Dante, the club would hardly be needed. A volume of quite sound statistical essays on poesy may quite easily drive a man to the movies, it may express nothing save the most per- fect judgements and the utmost refinements of descriptivity and whet, nevertheless, no appetite for the unknown best, or for the best still unread by the neophyte. A book 66 per cent concerned with manipulating and with re- handling the errors of seventy contemporary pestilential describers 360 and rehashers of opinion, and only 34 per cent concerned with focusing the reader's attention on the virtu of books worth reading is, at least to the present victim, more an annoyance than a source of jocundity. And if I am to put myself vicariously in the place of the younger reader or if I am to exercise parental protectiveness over some ima- gined offspring, I can find myself too angry for those mincing politenesses demanded by secondary editorial orders. My opinion of critics is that: The best are those who actually cause an amelioration in the art which they criticise. The next best are those who most focus attention on the best that is written (or painted or composed or cut in stone). And the pestilential vermin are those who distract attention from the best, either to the second rate, or to hokum, or to their own critical writings. Mr. Eliot probably ranks very high in the first of these three groups, and deserves badly of us for his entrance into the last. He uses Dryden legitimately in reducing exaggerated adulation of Milton, but the fact of his resurrecting Dryden poisons Professor Taupin, and so on and so, on, thence further proceeding. I don't at this point mean to criticise Taupin's Quatres Essais, but they offer me a fine chance to make an addendum. Taupin is interesting while writing of Frobenius and Dante. In the latter case I suspect a Flamand ancestry has saved him from the n.r.f. dither and wish-wash. There is (naturally?) a let down in the pages following. I suppose this is due to Taupin's respect for his elders. Professor Eliot in a fit of misanthropy dug up Dryden and Taupin was lured into reading him. The citation from Dryden may have been cleverly inserted by Taupin, at any rate it acts as a foil for his own somewhat cpntorted style to which one returns with relief from Dryden's platitude and verbosity. I am unable to determine whether Taupin is being superlatively astute and counting on the reader `seeing for himself ', or whether he was simply in a hurry, but 30 pages furnish a magnificent basis for deduction. Which he refrains from making. He may have expected the reader to see it for himself. I know from longer experience than Dr. René's that there is no use in expecting the reader to do anything of the sort. (No one has, for example, ever noticed the ground-plan of my Instigations.) On page 161 Taupin quotes Condillac: `Il y a deux espéces: le talent et le génie. Celui-lá continue les idées d'un art ou d'une science connue, d'une maniére propre á produire les effets qu'on en doit naturellement attendre Celui-ci ajoute au talent 1'idée d'esprit, en quelque sort créateur.' Talent `continues the ideas of a known art or science to produce naturally expectable results'. On page 164 he quotes Milton: `and twilight gray had in her sober livery all things clad'. No one can be so ignorant as to suppose this manner of expression is anything save that of an art known and applied by several dozen drama- tists. The Shakespearian original or model will instantly spring to the mind of almost any literate reader. But the known process is vilely used. It is disgustingly used. The Shakespearian line contains, I admit, one word not absolutely essential to the meaning. It ís a monosyllable and three of its four letters serve to concentrate and fulfil the double alliteration preceding. Anybody but a botcher would have omitted the two useless words from the Milton. He not only derives but dilutes. However, Taupin continues (still without heaving rocks at the victim) on the next page we find: `the setting.sun ' Gentlemen, ah wubb-wubb, what did the setting sun do? `the setting sun DESCENDED.' The abject and utter nullity of British criticism in general for over two centuries is nowhere so squalid and naked as in the fact that generations of Britons and humble Americans have gorie on swallow- ing this kind of rubbish. (Despite what Landor had shown them in his notes on Catullus.) The only camouflage used to put over this idiocy is a gross and uninteresting rhythm. The clodhoppers needed only one adverb between the subject and predicate to hide the underlying stupidity. Chateaubriand, in a passage subsequently cited, was not, as Taupin seems to imply, supinely imitating the passage, but possibly trying to correct it, everything in his description is in place. His paragraph, like most so called prose poetry, lacks adequate rhythmic vitality and has, con- sequently, the dullness germane to its category. MR. ELIOT'S GRIEF Mr. Eliot's misfortune was to find himself surrounded by a horrible and microcephalous bureaucracy which disliked poetry, it might be too much to say `loathed' it. But the emotion was as strong as any in the bureaucratie bosom. Bureaucracy has no loves and is composed mainly of varied minor dislikes. The members of this bureaucracy, sick with inferiority complex, had just enough wits to perceive that Eliot was their superior, but no means of detecting his limits or measuring him from the outside, and no experience that would enable them to know the poisons wherewith he had been injected. For that diagnosis perhaps only a fellow American is qualified, one having suffered an American University. The American University is or was aware of the existence of both German and English institutions, being younger and in a barbarous country, its inferiority complex impelled it to comparison and to a wish to equal and surpass, but gave it no immunity from the academical bacilli, inferiority complex directed against creative activity in the arts. That there is a percentage of bunk in the Selected Essays Mr. Eliot will possibly be the last to deny, but that he had performed a self analysis is still doubtful. This kind of essay assumes the existence of a culture that no longer subsists and does nothing to prepare a better culture that must or ought to come into being. I say `better', for the new paideuma will at least be a live paideuma not a dead one. Such essays are prepared NOT for editors who care about a living literature or a live tradition, or who even want the best of Eliot's perception applied to an author of second or third or fourth category (per ex. Seneca), they want to maintain a system wherein it is possible to receive fifteen guineas for an article of approximately 3,000-4,000 words, in a series to which Mr. Eliot's sensitivity and patience will give lustre and wherein his occasional eminence will shed respectability on a great mass of inferior writing. Their mentality is not far from that of a publisher of cheap editions who occasionally puts in a good book, so that the serious German will think that the miscellany is intellectual (ipse dicebat). Given the two or three real books in his series he believes the German highbrow will buy the rest thinking it the right thing to do. IN HAPPIER ERA The study of Latin authors was alive a century an~.quarter, perhaps aardly more than a century ago. Young men are now lured into colleges and universities largely on alse pretences. We live in a vile age when it is impossible to get reprints of the few iozen books that are practically essential to a competent knowledge of poetry. When Alexander Moring and Doctor Rouse set out to repub- ish the books that had been good enough for Shakespeare, the enterprise went on the rocks. You can't get a current edition of Golding's Metamorphoses, or of Gavin Douglas, or of Salel; the British grocer will break a contract for printing Cavalcanti when he would not dream of breaking a contract for prunes. In the matter of education, if the young are not to profit by our sweats, if they are not to pluck the fruits of our experience in the form of better curricula, it might be well to give it up altogether, At any rate the critic not aiming at a better curriculum for the serious study of literature is a critic half baked, swinging in a vacuum. It would be hypocrisy to pretend that Eliot's essays are not aimed at professors and students. The student is best aided by being able to read and to own conven- iently the best that has been created. Yeats, who has always been against the gang and the bureaucracy, now muddled, now profound, now merely Celtic or erroneously believing that a free Ireland, or at least a more Oirish Ireland, would help the matter, long ago prayed for a new sacred book. Every age has tried to compound such a volume. Every great culture has had such a major anthology. Pisistratus, Li Po, the Japanese Emperor who reduced the number of Noh dramas to about 450; the hackneyed Hebrew example; in less degree the Middle Ages, with the matter of Britain, of France, and of Rome le Grant. The time to be interested in Seneca may possibly have been before Mr. Shakespeare had written his plays. But assuming that Mr. Eliot's plenum exists, the relations of its different components have been changed in our time; there are most distinctly the movies which bear on all'dramatic construction, and there are Max Ernst's few volumes of engravings which have distinctly said their word about the Freudian novel. If the past 30 years have a meaning, that meaning is not very apparent in Mr. Eliot's condescensions to the demands of British serial publication. If it means anything it means a distinct reduction in the soLx of past literature that the future will carry. I should have no right to attack England's most accurate critic were it not in the hope of something better, if not in England, at least somewhere in space and time. There is a habit or practice of attacking the lists in How to Read. Young academes who have not read the works listed say my choice is capricious, most of them do not stop to see what my lists are lists OF. I have catalogued the towns in Dorset without mentioning Durham. I have listed the cities in England and Scotland and omitted Berwick-on-Tweed. Therefore the assistant professor or the weekly reviewer is educated, superlatively educated, and I am still impetuus iuventus, sipping with the bally bee and wholly unscienti6c in my methods. Mr Aldington was perhaps the most vociferous, he vociferised about forty contradictions of things that I hadn't said, perhaps out of kind- ness, thinking it the only way his paper would give the booklet two columns, perhaps because he fawncied himself as the fine olde nor- thern rough-haired St. Bernard defending the kittens of Alexandria. He has always tended to lose his shirt and breeches if one made any restrictive remarks about Greeks, even though it were only to suggest that some Greeks wrote better than others. Ut moveat, ut doceat, ut delectet. There are at least three kinds of inaccurate statement which might with advantage be dissociated. 1. The somewhat violent statement conveying a perception (quia perception it is something perceived by the writer), the inaccuracy of such statement is often more apparent than real, and as every reader resists an opinion diverse from his own, such statement is often, one might say is usually, corrected or more than corrected in transit. 2. There is the apparently careful statement containing all the possible, or at least so many, modifications of the main proposition that the main meaning is either lost in transit or so dampened down that it has no effect on the reader. Both these kinds of statement can be justified in various ways depending on where and why fhey are used. 3. There is the inaccurate statement that is just simply vague, either because the writer doesn't KNOW or because he is incompetent in expression. Such ignorance in successful vendors of their wares to current publications very often disguises itself as verity No. 2. Camoudage might be further subdivided: A. `Sound opinion', i.e. restating accepted opinion without any direct or personal knowledge. B. Covering this ignorance either with restrictive clauses, or scintil- lating with paradox. There is gongorism in critical wüting as well as in bad poetry. You might say that discussion of books ceases to be critical writing and becomes just the functioning of bureaucrary when the MAIN END (telos) is forgotten. As we cannot educate our grandfathers, one supposes that critical writing is committed for the purpose of educating our offspring, our contemporaries, or ourselves, and that the least a critic can do is to be aware of the present even if he be too swinish to consider the future. The crític is either a parasite or he is concerned with the growth of the next paideuma. Marinetti is thoroughly simpatico. Writing and orating ut moveat, he has made demands that no one considers in their striet literal sense, but which have, and have had, a definite scope. `An early play of no merit whatever', `the brain of a fourth-rate playwright' as matters of an highly specialised clinic may conceivably have something to do with critical standards. The impression is that their importance must be limited to some very minor philological field. Their import for tomorrow's paideúma is probably slight. As specialist and practising writer one might want to know whether Seneca wrote any other lines as effective as Per alta vada spatia sublimi aethere Mr: Eliot can think of no other play which reserves such a shock for the last word. (Ref. or cf. O. Henry's stories, bell in the last pages.) The only trouble with the citation is that it is a bit ambiguous: Mr. Eliot and Professor Miller disagreeing as to its theological import, Mr. Eliot inclining to the Christian interpretation, or what Seneca ought to have meant. No, I mustn't exaggerate. Seneca is not being Christian. Mr. Eliot votes against a sweeping atheistical meaning. I can't personally see that the old half bore goes further than asserting that the gods are not in that particular district of the aether. If there is anything about justice, it must be in the context, not in the two lines quoted. In the present decomposition and under the yoke of the present bureaucracy it would probably be too much to demand that before discussing an author a reviewer answer the following questions: 1. Have you read the original text of the author under discussion? or how much of it have you read? 2. Is it worth reading? or how much of it is worth reading? and by whom? As for Elizabethan dramedy, Lamb and Hazlitt are supposed to have set the fad, but Lamb at any rate did pick out a volume of selections; showing what he thought might be the basis of an interest. The proportion between discussíon and the exhibits the discusser dares show his reader is possibly a good, and probably a necessary, test of his purpose. In a matter of degree, I am for say 80 per cent exhibit and 20 per cent yatter. Mr. Eliot and Miss Moore are definitely fighting against an impover- ishment of culture, against a paucity of reading programme. Neither they nor anyone else is likely to claim that they have as much interest in life as I have, or that I have their patience in reading. That does not make it any less necessary to distinguish between Eliot registering his belief re a value, and Eliot ceding to the bad, not to say putrid habits of the bureaucracy which has surrounded him. As alarmist, as capricious, perverse, etc., I repeat that you cannot get the whole cargo of a sinking paideuma on tó the lifeboat. If you propose to have any live literature of the past kept in circulation, available (flat materialism) in print at prices the eager reader can pay, there has got to be more attention to the best and to the basic. Once th.at is established you can divagate into marginalia, but the challenge will be more incisive and the criteria will be more rigorous. In citing the Miltonic burble I am merely on my .way towards a further assertion. The critical sense shows more in composition than in a critical essay. The unwelcome and disparate authors whom I have gathered in this volume have mostly accepted certain criteria which duller wits have avoided. They have mostly, if not accepted, at any rate faced the demands, and considered the works, made and noted in my How to Read. That in itself is not a certificate of creative ability, but it does imply a freedom from certain forms of gross error and from certain kinds of bungling which will indubitably consign many other contemporary writings to the ash-bin, with more than expected celerity. Mr. Bunting probably seems reactionary to most of the other contributors. I think the apparent reaction is a definite endeavour to emphasise certain necessary elements which the less considering American experimentoretend to omit. At any rate Mr. Bunting asserted that ambition some years ago, but was driven stih further into the American ambience the moment he looked back upon British composition of, let us say, 1927-8. I believe that Britain, in rejecting certain facts (facts, not opinions) in 1912-15 entered a sterile decade. Willingness to experiment is not enough, but unwillingness to experime nt is mere death. If ten pages 'out of its two hundred and fifty go irito a Corpus Poetarum of A.D. 2033, the present volume will amply be justified. (Yes, I know I have split the future of that verb. Var. will; and amply.) I have not attempted to represent all the new poets, I am leaving the youngest, possibly some of the brightest, to someone else or to future effort, not so much from malice or objection to perfect justice, as from inability to do everything all at once. There are probably fifty very bright poems that are not here assembled. I suspect Mr. S. Putnam has written two or three. Mr. Bridson is champing on the bit. Someone more in touch with the younger Americans ought to issue an anthology or a special number of some periodical, selected with criteria, either his or mine. The assertion implicit in this volume is that after ten or twenty years of serious effort you can consider a writer uninteresting, but the charges of flightiness and dilettantism are less likely to be valid. In fact they are unlikely to be valid if a consistent direction can be discovered. Other things being equai, the results of processes, even of secondary processes application, patience, etc., are more pertinent from living writers than from dead ones, or are more pertinent when demonstrably IN RELATION with the living present than with the classified past. Classic in eurrent publishers' advertisements seems to have attained its meaning via classé, rangé. The history of literature as taught in many institutions (? all) is nothing more (hardly more) than a stratified record of snobisms in which chronology sometimes counts for more than the causal relation and is also often whoily ignored, I- mean ignored usually when it conflicts with prejudice and when chronological fact destroys a supposed causal relation. I have resisted several temptations to reply to attacks on How to Read, because on examination the stricture was usually answered in my own text, and the attacker, had he been serious, could have found the cor- rection where he assumed the fault. Several objectors (ut ante) simply have not taken the trouble to consider what my lists are lists of. Others ignorant of the nature of some of the texts cited have assumed that they are not what they are. Others have assumed that where; for sake of brevity, I have not given reasons for the inclusion of certain items, no reasons exist or can possibly. Madox Ford made a serious charge, but not against what is on the pages of the booklet. He indicated that a section of what would be a more nearly complete treatise on the whole art of composition was not included. You can't get everything into 45 pages. Nor did the author of How to Read claim universal knowledge and competence. Neither in the title nor anywhere in the text did the booklet claim to be a treatise on the major structure of novels and epics, nor even a guide to creative composition. As for experiment: the claim is that without constant experiment literature dies. Experiment is oNa of the elements necessary to its life. Experiment aíms at writing that will have a relation to the present analogous to the relation which past masterwork had to the life of its time. Eliot applying what he has learned from Morire. applying what he has learned by being bored with as much of the rest of,Seneca as he has bothered to read, is a vastly more vital Eliot, and a much more intensively critical Eliot than when complying with the exigencie of the present and verminous system for the excernment of book-reviews. I might also assert that Eliot going back to the original has derived a vastly more vivid power than was possible to the century and more of Elizafiers who were content to lap the cream offLamb and Hazütt or to assume a smattering of Elizabéthan bumbast from Elizabethan de- rivers. Quod erat demonstrandum. Quod erat indicatum, even by the present di~turber of repose anno 1917 and thereabouts. And herein lies also the confutation of that horrible turba parasitorum paedagogorumque volgus which Mr. Eliot tolerates in his vicinage. `ACTIVE ANTHOLOGY' (Retrospect twenty months later) A dislike of Bunting's poetry and Zukofsky's is possibly due to haste. Their verse is more thoughtful than toffee-lickers require. At intervals, months apart, I remember a passage, or I re-open my volume of excerpts and find something solid. It did not incinerate any Hudson river. Neither did Marianne Moore's when it first (20 years since) came to London. You have to read such verse slowly. Apart from Bunting and Zukofsky, Miss Moore's is the solidest stuff in the Anthology. Williams' is simple by comparison-not so thought- ful. It has a larger audience because of its apparetst~i~nplicity. It is the lyric of an aptitude. Aptitude, not attitude. Anschauung, that Dr. Williams has stuck in and to for half a century. The workmanship is not so much cared for. And yet Williams has become the first prose writer in America, the best prose writer who now gets into print, McAlmon having disappeared from circulation, and being a different case altogether, panoramic Velasquez, where Williams is just solid. What goes into his case note is THERE. If there is any more solid solidity outside Papa Gustave, I don't know where to find it. Joyce was not more substantial in the Portrait of the Artist: I am not sure that the cutting hasn't lightened his block. In his verse Williams' integrity passes for simplicity. Ilnadulterated non-elaboration in the phrase, a `simple substance', simple has an analogous meaning; wheréas Zukofsky Bunting and Miss Moore are all thoughtful, much more so than the public desires. `Man is not an end product', is much too condensed a phrase to tickle the gobbler. The case of Cumming's `eimi' and the bearing of Cocteau's sensibility on this discussion will hade to wait further, and more thorough, treatment than I have given them. Mr. Wyndham Lewis' Apes.looms somewhere in the domain of Gulliver and Tristram Shandy. |
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[1]From Active Anthology (1933). |