Stalin on Linguistics and Other Essays

Language, Discourse, Society General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley Selected published titles: ...

Author: Piers Gray

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Language, Discourse, Society General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley Selected published titles: Norman Bryson VISION AND PAINTING The Logic of the Gaze Elizabeth Cowie REPRESENTING THE WOMAN Cinema and Psychoanalysis Theresa de Lauretis TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE The Woman’s Film of the 1940s Alan Durant CONDITIONS OF MUSIC Jane Gallop FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS The Daughter’s Seduction Peter Gidal UNDERSTANDING BECKETT A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett Piers Gray, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild STALIN ON LINGUISTICS AND OTHER ESSAYS Alan Hunt GOVERNANCE OF THE CONSUMING PASSIONS A History of Sumptuary Law Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT The Emergence of Literary Education Jeffrey Minson GENEALOGIES OF MORALS Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES Christopher Norris RESOURCES OF REALISM Prospects for ‘Post-Analytic’ Philosophy

Denise Riley ‘AM I THAT NAME?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History Jacqueline Rose PETER PAN, OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CHILDREN’S FICTION Moustapha Safouan JACQUES LACAN AND THE QUESTION OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING (Translated and introduced by Jacqueline Rose) Stanley Shostak THE DEATH OF LIFE The Legacy of Molecular Biology Lyndsey Stonebridge THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT British Psychoanalysis and Modernism Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory David Trotter THE MAKING OF THE READER Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry Geoffrey Ward STATUTES OF LIBERTY The New York School of Poets

Language, Discourse, Society Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71482–2 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Stalin on Linguistics and other Essays Piers Gray Edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild

Introduction © Colin MacCabe 2002; Chapters 1–4 and 7 © the Literary Estate of Piers Gray 2002; Chapters 5, 6 and 8 © Critical Quarterly ; Chapter 9 © Denis MacShane 2002; Chapter 10 © Roy Harris 2002. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–79282–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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Contents vi

Acknowledgements Introduction by Colin MacCabe

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Part One: Essays I 1 Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium: the Course of a Particular

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2 On the Use of the Sonnet in Romeo and Juliet, or ‘But Where’s the Bloody Horse?’

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3 The Community of Interpretation: T. S. Eliot and Josiah Royce

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4 Hong Kong, Shanghai, the Great Wall: Bernard Shaw in China

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Part Two: Essays II 5 The Comedy of Suffering

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6 Totalitarian Logic: Stalin on Linguistics

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7 Oaths and Laughter and Indecent Speech

189

8 On Linearity

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Part Three: Memoirs 9 Piers in Hong Kong by Denis MacShane

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10 Language: Black, White and Shades of Gray by Roy Harris

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Index

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Acknowledgements The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission from the Critical Quarterly to reprint Chapter 5: ‘The Comedy of Suffering’, Chapter 6: ‘Totalitarian Logic: Stalin on Linguistics’, and Chapter 8: ‘On Linearity’. Without the devoted attention of Anne Carver this book could not have been completed. Without the scrupulous proof-reading and corrections of Sally Stewart it might never have achieved publishable form. The editors would also like to thank the following for their invaluable help: Valery Rose, Caroline Richards, Patricia Hymans, Frances Wood and Simon Gray.

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Introduction Colin MacCabe Piers Gray died on 28 June 1996 at the early age of 49. This collection of essays had been planned for over a year before that and Piers had sent me all the contents bar the final essay in January of the year he died. I received a draft of that final essay, with the title ‘Narrative, Linearity and the Pun’, a little later and we discussed possible revisions by phone. We had expected that he would put the final touches to the collection that summer but his untimely death meant that the final redaction fell to me and it has taken me over a year to complete a task that should not have taken me even a month. The present collection is very close to the one that he himself had envisaged. A revised version of the final essay, now called ‘On Linearity’, was found amongst his papers. This magisterial essay in which he brings to conclusion a lifetime’s meditation on language and literature strikes such a valedictory tone that it is difficult not to read it as a conscious farewell. It is certainly a final and finished version of this his most accomplished piece of criticism. The endnotes have been corrected by his devoted partner, Annie Carver, but otherwise the essay is the testament that he left. For the rest, everything is as he explicitly ordained it except for the fact that he had written to me that he thought the Romeo and Juliet essay ‘needs a deft polish (i.e. throwing out all the italics)’. I toyed with following his instructions literally but then found myself unwilling to jettison all the italics and unhappy to choose which to retain. In the end it seemed better to print this, like all the previously published essays, as they had originally appeared. None of this can hide the fact that this volume is not the book that we planned together. I had suggested the volume to Piers and my fellow editors because I felt that the series of essays he had produced in the 1990s (see Part Two: ‘Essays II’) were the most original literary criticism produced by my generation. Literary criticism is about as unfashionable a term as one can find in the universities today. Semiotics, cultural studies, new historicism – the neologisms that replace literary criticism chase one another with an ever-increasing rapidity. What they all share is a desire to escape a valuation of literature in favour of a study of a more widely understood culture. Piers’s originality was that he saw the second as an extension of the first. But the work he thus produced fell vii

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outside the categories of any of the major schools be they ‘conservative’ or ‘radical’. I had hoped, before his death, that this volume could represent his work to a critical and cultural establishment to which he was returning after twenty years in Hong Kong. Circumstances now mean that it can serve no utilitarian purpose for its author. This volume does not, therefore, mark a transition but an ending and I fear that Piers understood this well. It will serve as a memorial – as testimony to an intelligence that was little heeded in its lifetime outside the circle of his friends. It is for that reason that I asked Roy Harris, undoubtedly his closest colleague in his final years, and Denis MacShane, one of his oldest friends, to contribute the short memoirs that are to be found at the end of this volume. It is also for that reason that I have included as the opening essay Gray’s graduate student dissertation on Wallace Stevens: ‘The Course of a Particular’ (see Part One: ‘Essays I’). There is no doubt that Piers himself would not have approved its publication – it was for him a work of apprenticeship. It deserves publication, however, on two counts. First, it introduces clearly the problems of language and representation which were to be Piers’s constant theme for the rest of his life. This essay makes clear how he came to these problems first through his reading of Stevens’s poetry. Second, despite the fact that it was written by a young student over quarter a century ago and despite the considerable quantity of Stevens’s scholarship and criticism since then, it remains a fresh and perceptive introduction to the central problematic of Stevens’s poetry. The essay on Stevens was part of the requirements for Cambridge’s Diploma in English. In an age where universities create new postgraduate degrees en masse, it is difficult to cast one’s mind back to a time when one-year postgraduate degrees at Oxbridge were an innovation and were not considered worthy of any greater certification than a diploma. Piers took the diploma because, despite working ferociously hard, he was not successful in obtaining a First in his undergraduate degree and could not, therefore, proceed immediately to a doctorate. This was a hard blow for one who was fiercely competitive and it was to colour his outlook for many years afterwards. It is easy to label examiners stupid, but, truth to tell, it may have been difficult to distinguish in a three-hour exam between Piers who had thought through every line of Scrutiny dogma from first principles and a candidate who was just wearily regurgitating Leavisite nostrums. Cambridge in the 1960s was abandoning the long hold that Dr Leavis had held on its brightest and most promising English students. Raymond Williams’s patient tracing of the connections between concept and class, form and technology was beginning to outline

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the new genre of cultural studies. Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes were waging their fight against interpretation which was to transform itself almost simultaneously into structuralism and post-structuralism. Perhaps most important at the time, although, until now, it has remained without significant issue, Northrop Frye’s Christian anthropology swept all before it. But not Piers Gray. Magnificently isolated in his time warp, apparently immune both to the ideas and the pleasures of the late 1960s, Piers stuck with his Scotch and the Great Tradition, ever more determinedly working out an ethic of language and self which was to serve him in good stead when the cultural, historical and literary assumptions of the good Dr Leavis had been consigned to their provincial and parochial place. The first step out of that place was Stevens. Stevens’s poetry dramatised the relation between language and reality, language and self in a way which made clear how epistemologically naïve Leavis’s formulations were. When Piers obtained a distinction in his diploma and a doctorate became a possibility, it was these epistemological questions which he wanted to address. The question which was to obsess him all his life – how does private experience become publicly available and why is it that poetic uses of language are crucial to this process? – began to take shape in a doctorate on T. S. Eliot’s early poetic and philosophical development. In choosing Eliot, Piers was addressing the most important poet in the Leavisite canon; in concentrating on the early philosophical thought he was ignoring Leavis’s distaste for all questions about language and interpretation which could not be settled in the discursive context of a Cambridge supervision. Piers’s interest in philosophy was an early one and he had begun a degree in the subject at Dalhousie University in Canada. His father was a pathologist whose career alternated between hospitals in England and Canada, and the dual cultural education that this entailed for Piers was crucial to his outlook. But a final familial passage across the Atlantic to England decided Piers that it was Cambridge and English that would claim his allegiance rather than Dalhousie and philosophy. He was fortunate to find at Cambridge, both in his undergraduate director of studies, Theo Redpath, and in his doctoral supervisor, Jeremy Prynne, teachers who would encourage this philosophical enquiry while also insisting on the most rigorous philological attention to the poetry in question and the ineluctability of the ethical element in interpretation. It is perhaps typical of Piers’s idiosyncrasy that as he approached the fundamental question of the relations between language and literature he should choose to do so through the neglected American and British

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Idealist tradition rather than through the more conventional names of Nietzsche and Heidegger, not to mention their epigones Foucault and Derrida. His choice, however, was not simply a personal quirk. Leaving aside the real possibility that Bradley and Royce may in the future come to have a centrality to the history of philosophy that their current marginal position does not suggest, it is certain that both philosophers were concerned with questions of social intelligibility that are simply ignored by the dominant strains of German and French philosophy. Above all, Piers always started from the poetry, and Eliot’s poetry led back into that Anglo-American idealism. The matter of his dissertation was the central paradox of the idealist tradition in which Eliot had been philosophically formed. How could one move from the incommunicable opacities of individual experience to the possibilities of historical and social being? Gray’s dissertation, published as T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909–1922 (Brighton: Harvester 1982), remains the best single introduction to Eliot’s thought and its relation to the early poetry. In leaving behind the narrow Leavisism of his undergraduate days, Piers opened himself up to more than the writings of Bradley and Royce. The counter-culture that he had hitherto ignored now attracted his attention and he became the most conservative of hippies. This expansion of his horizons enabled him to integrate his love of popular culture, particularly sport, with his elaborate intellectual concerns. He became the most acute analyst in all areas of meaning: a cricket match, a friendship or a film would be analysed with the same intensity and concepts as a poem or a philosophical thesis. The counter-culture also entailed an engagement with Marxism. It would seem absurd to call Piers a Marxist for he had no time at all for the self-dramatising pomposity of the academic left. He did, however, have real knowledge of both Marx and Engels and his understanding of the tension between the social and the individual was informed by historical materialism. There was also a considerable interest in the early translations of Benjamin, who he rightly read as the thinker in the Marxist tradition whose concerns came nearest to his own. It is typical of Piers’s independence of mind that he came to Benjamin not through the Frankfurt School but through Benjamin’s reading of Bergson. Questions of memory and identity were as crucial to Eliot as they were to Benjamin and both found in the now neglected Bergson crucial formulations in their efforts to articulate together self and society. Eliot, of course, had never solved intellectually the tension between the private and the public, between the individual and the social,

Introduction

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between the particular and the universal. His abandoned thesis on Bradley bore witness to that as did, in a very different register, the poems from Prufrock to the Hollow Men. The solution he found was not in reason but in faith. Anglo-Catholicism offered exactly the form of institutional mediation between self and society which allowed the private and the public to communicate. This solution was simply unacceptable to Piers. This unacceptability was made the more evident after Piers joined the English department of the University of Hong Kong at the beginning of 1977. The initial contact with Chinese culture was liberating, as was the immersion in a department where both language and linguistics were taken seriously. Eliot’s Eurocentrism, once dismissed as intellectually untenable, was now perceived as politically wicked. For the next ten years China and the history of its exploitation by the West was to be his obsession – an obsession fuelled by his realisation of what a key role China had played in the careers of Richards and Empson, critics to whom he was increasingly drawn. The essay on Shaw comes from this period and shows how carefully and subtly he was able to read the complex interrelations between China and the West. He was also in the forefront of those who went to teach in China after the Gang of Four had been toppled. Throughout this period he was the keenest analyst of British policy towards China and his outrage at Howe and Thatcher’s abandonment of Hong Kong’s Chinese population was fuelled by the intimate knowledge that this was just the final chapter in a very long book of racist contempt. But the engagement with China and Hong Kong faded and the delight at having been shipped somewhere East of Suez dimmed. To pretend that there was a single reason for this development would be to ignore the whole thrust of Gray’s writing about the complexity of experience, but it is possible to isolate certain factors. First and foremost was a growing sense of failure. The Eliot book received little public notice even if its major themes and arguments were to become generally accepted. But that reverse could have been endured were it not for the almost continuous rejection of his fiction both narrative and dramatic. He had written some poetry as an undergraduate but the 1970s had been devoted to criticism and philosophy. From the end of that decade he was to devote as much of his time to the writing of drama and fiction as he was to critical essays. This writing was both powerful and original but it was also idiosyncratic and fell into no recognisable genre or idiom. Although he often seemed on the brink of acceptance and although in his final years he knew local

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success both in Hong Kong and Edinburgh, he never saw his fiction published nor his plays given a major production in London. These reverses were compounded by increasing frustration with his university. Underlying even the early optimism in Hong Kong was a fundamental concern about teaching literature to students who had not adequately mastered its language. This concern was to turn to despair. At the same time he objected strongly to attempts to teach comparative literature without first teaching students the relevant language. It may have been these strongly held views or it may simply have been his inability to bend or sway with the institutional wind that meant that he never received due recognition or promotion. More fundamental than these institutional problems was the astonishing fact, particularly given his views on the centrality of language, that he declined to learn Chinese. He was a more than competent linguist and there is perhaps no clearer sign of his reluctance or inability to consummate a permanent relationship with China than this simple fact. But if literary fame and academic promotion eluded him, it was alcohol which destroyed him. Gray had always been a heavy drinker but in the last ten years of his life it began to encroach on his life in ever more distressing ways. The earliest of these signs was a growing claustrophobia which, amongst other things, made it increasingly difficult for him to board planes and left him a virtual prisoner in Hong Kong. But this last period of his life had its own pleasures. If he had lost patience with his university then the arrival of Roy Harris from the Chair of General Linguistics at Oxford provided him with a colleague with whom he could engage as an intellectual equal. If he could no longer take the plane to see his friends in London, he found with Annie Carver, and to use his own words, ‘the gift of present laughter’. He also established a close relationship with her young son Gordon to whom he was to leave his library. He was also to consume his last years in a frenzy of writing. Play followed novel followed essay in a carnival of composition. His critical attention first turned to questions of Englishness. In his dissertation Gray had identified clearly how Eliot’s assumption of Englishness had grown out of historical problems about the nature of American identity; problems in which anti-Semitism played a constitutive role. Hong Kong had taught him how narrow a definition of Englishness Eliot had proposed: a definition which understood imperialism in relation to a Roman and European past rather than a colonial and global present. But what had allowed Eliot to play such a central role in twentiethcentury definitions of Englishness? A major part of the answer was to be found in the First World War and the way in which Gray and Eliot’s

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chosen ethnicity had foundered in the trenches. Ivor Gurney became an absolutely emblematic figure for Gray; a quintessential Englishman whose sanity had found it impossible to survive the realities of trench warfare. He examined his predicament both in essay form and in his most successful play: a one-act monologue in which Gurney tries vainly to bring order to his nightmarish experience. The essay on Gurney was joined in Marginal Men (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave, 1991) to analyses of Edward Thomas and J. R. Ackerley which sketched out the variety of emotional and spiritual impasses which constituted Englishness in the twentieth century. The impasses were as much his own as the writers’, about whom he wrote so movingly. But even as the alcohol tightened its grip on his body, he found the resources within him to write what are his finest essays. They constitute the second half of this volume. His thought continued to develop and the methods of Leavisism were applied with deep linguistic and historical knowledge across a range of tests that would have appalled the Cambridge critic. Oscar Wilde’s dialogue at his trial with the prosecuting counsel Edward Carson, the linguistics of swearing, Stalin’s theory of language, idiom and experience in American pulp fiction: the range of material covered and the acuity of the analysis offers a real model for the transition from literary criticism to cultural studies. But the work went largely unrecognised, the novels unpublished, the plays barely performed and Gray was invalided out of the university at the end of 1995. During that year his body had begun to succumb to the assaults that he had inflicted on it. As it became clear that he was in mortal danger his partner Annie, his beloved brother Simon, the playwright whom he had so much wished to emulate, and his many friends tried everything to stop him drinking. But however many times he dried out and however many cures were attempted, the consolations of alcohol proved too potent. His final six months when he returned to London provided a curiously peaceful epilogue. The rage and fury of the previous year were replaced by a weary acceptance of addiction. He was, in his brother’s all too accurate words, ‘a man who had resigned from his own future’. He completed his revisions of ‘On Linearity’ and then between one friend’s party and another’s, in the midst of England’s progress through Euro ’96 and awaiting the arrival from Hong Kong of Annie and Gordon, he died. I have delayed writing this introduction for many months. Sloth and overwork have made their inevitable contributions to this delay but as I

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have finally undertaken the task, I have realised that grief too has had its part to play. As long as this book was unfinished then my conversations with Piers, which stretch back thirty years to when we were undergraduates together at Trinity College, Cambridge, were unfinished. But finish them I must in the hope that the publication of these essays will allow others to appreciate the acuity of his interpretations, the breadth of his references and the wisdom of his judgements. Pittsburgh January 1998

Colin MacCabe

Part One Essays I

1 Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium: the Course of a Particular

I In an age of disbelief, or what is the same thing, in a time that is largely humanistic, in one sense or another, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his measure and in his style.1

Wallace Stevens’ poetic life was dedicated to supplying the satisfactions of belief; by replacing the dissolved gods of past imaginations ‘to believe beyond belief’. 2 It is for the poet, a creature of capable imagination, to project new aesthetic creations which would relieve us of the sense of feeling, ‘dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that [seems] deserted, in which the amical halls and rooms [have] taken on a look of hardness and emptiness.’ 3 So it is that in ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’: Poetry Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns. (CP, p. 167) The poem of earth must be written in their stead for, as he says in ‘Anatomy of Monotony’, ‘our nature is her nature’ (CP, p. 107). Our paradise is in the imperfect. If we regard past ideals as aesthetic projections of dead societies, and hence of relative value, in seeking to define our new bearing in a new reality it must follow that we cannot project new ideals, new absolutes that will rigidly order the actual. Desire should be for ‘the full flower of 3

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Stalin on Linguistics and other Essays

the actual, not the California fruit of the ideal’.4 There is no one Truth, no absolute. It was when I said ‘There is no such thing as the truth,’ That the grapes seemed fatter. The fox ran out of his hole. (‘On the Road Home’, CP, p. 203) Or: ‘Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.’5 In a late essay, ‘On Poetic Truth’ (1954), Stevens affirmed his idea of the way in which poetry, as a ‘statement of the relation between man and the world, [has] to do with reality in that concrete and individual aspect of it which the mind can never tackle altogether on its own terms, with matter that is foreign and alien in a way in which abstract systems . . . can never be’.6 For ‘its function . . . is precisely this contact with reality as it impinges on us from the outside, the sense that we can touch and feel a solid reality which does not wholly dissolve itself into the conceptions of our own minds. It is the individual and particular that does this’.7 The coming to reality in an open and pragmatic way is the life of poetry; applying itself to the details of the world, seeking in its form to suggest the resemblances between reality and its particulars, yet without destroying the integrity of each particular in itself; for the poem, the act of the imagination, ‘never yet progressed except by particulars. Having gained the world, the imagination remains available to (the poet) in respect to all the particulars of the world.’ 8 If our apprehension of the actual is to be thus, so the words of the poem, or of the imaginative statement of the relation of man to his world, the confrontation of mind with concrete matter, must be faithful to the particulars of reality. Aphorisms from Adagia (OP) give a more specific statement of the nature of poetic truth: ‘The exquisite environment of fact. The final poem will be the poem in the language of fact.’ ‘The ideal is the actual become anaemic.’ ‘Some objects are less susceptible to metaphor than others. The whole world is less susceptible to metaphor than a teacup is.’ ‘Poetry is a pheasant disappearing in the brush.’

Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium

5

The same belief rendered poetically: For so retentive of themselves are men That music is intensest which proclaims The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom, (‘To the One of Fictive Music’, CP, p. 88) From that urge to possess the object, the other, ‘our feignings’ come. The fictive music mediates our reality; and ‘poetry is the supreme fiction, madame’ (‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’, CP, p. 59). But this ‘supreme fiction’ is not that of Transport to Summer. After thirty years of meditation, Stevens was prepared to suggest what poetry ‘must be’. Through the process of abstraction (or extraction) from the particulars the imagination creates in artistic form the new particular: the fiction without which we are unable to conceive of the world.9 The poem is the act of the mind, given form; the perception of reality’s process through the imagination. It is the attempt to discover the possible work of art in the world. So that Stevens’ own measure as a poet, in spite of all the passions of all the lovers of the truth, is the measure of his power to abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his abstraction the reality on which the lovers of truth insist. He must be able to extract himself and also to abstract reality, which he does by placing it in his imagination.10 Notes toward a Supreme Fiction is a series of meditations which qualify, and are qualified by, propositions about the meaning of poetry. In their entirety these notes suggest a definition of the nature of the poetic, and make the statement of our relation to the world. The ‘supreme fiction’ in Harmonium is not, in these terms, realised. The urgency, which borders on shrillness of assertion, of ‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’, is for belief in a fiction that ‘will make widows wince’. In Harmonium the poems take life from the tension between perceiving mind and a world of particulars. They spring from the desire to express a statement of this interaction, in an age of disbelief, without falsifying through idealisation. The finest poems suggest with meticulous honesty that primary difficulty for a poet who refuses the absolute: the struggle to find the form which that statement of the relationship of mind and world may take; to achieve the poem in which words are faithful to the particulars. The poem must be poised, as it were, between the reality of relative things in flux and the human desire, the most urgent human

6


need, to make experience cohere; to understand the world, that is, through our words. The balance is precarious; that ‘final finding of the ear, in the thing itself’ (CP, p. 97) is the attempt to achieve a form, realised in language, adequate to our perceptions, truthful to our fluctuating experiences. The perceiver alone discovers order, alone denies the chaos of a world of things in themselves, alone creates a possible harmony with a world continuously on the point of washing us away in its magnitude. In Harmonium the poet, speaking in a variety of tones, tells us of this difficulty of creating the satisfaction of beliefs in a form which is true to the world of fluctuating finite particulars, to realise a coherence in poetry, without making assertions of an abstract truth deduced from prior conceptions. The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, If one may say so. And yet relation appears, A small relation expanding like the shade Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill. (‘Connoisseur of Chaos’, CP, p. 215)

II After the disappearance of the gods with what was Stevens left? He formulated part of the answer in the essay ‘Two or Three Ideas’. 11 ‘What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementos behind, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth. There was no crying out for their return. . . . There was always in every man the increasingly human self, which instead of remaining the observer, the non-participant, the delinquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left him to resolve life and the world in his own terms.’12 We had become participants; and of ourselves was poetry to be made. And so it is just that Stevens’ first major poem should attempt to resolve that loss of foci of belief in terms of the increasingly human self. Even out of ignoble desires comes the permanence of artistic creation, and it is in such acts of the human spirit, as Stevens was to suggest throughout Harmonium, that we may achieve new forces adequate to the loss of belief. Thus in that abstract set of equations which casually begin ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, the poem’s informing intelligence draws out the analogy between human emotion and art:


7

Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. (‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, CP, p. 90) And the nature of that desire is given an ironic particularity in the simile of the parable of Susanna and the red-eyed elders. The musical equation which introduced the poem clearly defines the nature of their (and by extension the poet’s) emotions: The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna. But Susanna, as she bathed and . . . searched The touch of springs, experiences her own music. For she explores the ‘note or brief strain of instrumental music’13 (and we remember the additional meanings of touch as feeling and feeling as music): of springs, which can mean ‘motives’,14 or source of her actions. Thus in herself, she found ‘concealed imaginings’, and sighed for ‘so much melody’ or, by suggestion, ‘feeling’. And in the pun on ‘spring’, her self-exploration is suggestively enlarged, as she assimilates within herself the world; or rather realises no distinction between the two. Thus on the bank, in the cool of exhausted emotions (or excess of ‘melody’) she . . . felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions, or the obligations of old reverence. Thus Stevens is leading us toward the interruption of the elders; the world, attendant upon her, pre-figuring them in the ‘quaverings’ and ‘waverings’ of grass and wind. (We might note too, how the apposition of ‘quavering’ to either Susanna or the grass is syntactically uncertain.) The interruption of her ‘music’, her complete innocence in nakedness ironically seen as narcissistic, by the

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‘roaring horns’ of the elders and the simpering Byzantines (now replacing the winds), brings her into self-consciousness and destroys her absorption in the world. The elders’ dissonant feelings: A cymbal crashed And roaring horns, disrupt her reverie, and bring with the lamps of the simpering Byzantines self-consciousness of her nakedness; ‘shame’. But out of this desire for the other, the beautiful, comes art. Susanna’s emotions were self-concerned, the world was an extension of herself. They have no external references; her melodies are ‘sighed for’, and her emotions ‘spent’ are transient. The idea of beauty is momentary when contained within the mind, but in art, when made flesh, it is immortal. Thus although the body and its emotions die, the beauty of the body, so figured in art, can live. The last stanza resolves this abstract paradox, presenting physical death in three metaphors which parallel the parable of Susanna: Of a green evening, clear and warm, She bathed in her still garden, while The red-eyed elders watching, felt . . . . So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting.

(I)

(IV)

And as the elders feel their music for her; In witching chords, and their thin blood pulse pizzicati of Hosanna,

(I)

so that lustful music, which defiles her innocence, is modified in the third metaphor: So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden’s choral, by the suggestion of the recreative process in ‘auroral’ into a purity of celebration which is explained in the last three lines as being the immortality of art. For although the emotions of both Susanna (her


9

music) and the strains of feeling her innocent self-regard aroused are transient and in the past: Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death’s ironic scraping that feeling is made immortal music, is beauty given form or body, and plays on in the feeling made ever present, ‘on the clear viol’ of her remembrance. The ‘pizzicati of Hosanna’ became, in art, ‘the constant sacrament of praise’, the music. And by extension, the poet’s feelings made music, his desire, realises itself as immortal in the form of the poem. Thus, in art we realise an illusion of immortality, a figuring forth of transient human emotions, which offers a resolution of life on our own terms and celebrates the ‘increasingly human self’. The relation of art to the creative sexual self was to be considered, as we shall see, in two of Stevens’ later poems, ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ and ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, each re-qualifying the conclusion of ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, and seeking to realise further possible affirmations of the godless human self. As the affirmation of the human self, art is the expression of desire for beauty given particular form; made incarnate. That beauty which causes such expression is to be found in the transient particulars of the world: Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven. (‘Sunday Morning’, CP, p. 67) Only in expressing our desire for such beauty, in its transience, can we find our comforts. For this world is our paradise, those past Edens were imaginative projections of this world. The illusion of immortality which art provides is not in making this world an ideal, but in expressing the recreative energies (the very expression of death) manifest in life’s particular forms. Moreover, it would be, for us, a failure of the imagination to suggest that the ideal is merely that which is around us in frozen form. Alas, that they should wear our colours there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

(VI)

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The consolation offered in ‘Sunday Morning’ for our ‘island solitude’ is the acceptance of an earth that is unsponsored and so free: Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires.

(V)

Any form of creativity (‘desires’) is possible only because of such transience. It is in union with the earth that divinity is to be found; in the understanding that no longer is our bounty to be given to dead gods. So from the conjunction of the human and the natural world comes the possibility of release from the ‘Dominion of the Blood’ of the crucifixion. For: Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

(III)

To accept that Jesus is in his grave, and that we live free, yet alone, in the inexplicable chaos of the natural world, is to understand that the paradise we so burningly desire is here, in that: Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail whistle about us their spontaneous cries, Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness,

(VIII)

precisely because: At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness on extended wings. It is apt that as the poem’s meditation grew out of the particulars which surround us, which in their brilliant colours: . . . mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice,

(I)

dispelling the presence of abstract ideal demands upon individual life (‘Abstraction is a part of idealism. It is in that sense that it is ugly’);15 so


11

it affirms the imperfect paradise in a reduction to the most minute of minutiae, to the particular which is the base of reality. Yet we might consider here that, for all the suggestive emphasis upon particularity within the movement of the poem, there is an exclusiveness, an emblematic quality to the deer, quail and berries, and to the plums and pears. They have been extracted from the wilderness. Given a representational value, they are examples of the particularisation upon which reality is founded. To realise this earth as paradise is to come to an accord with reality in which our sacraments shall be in praise of the natural world: Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn . . . And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills . . . .

(VII)

This stanza allows an assimilation of the natural world within men, in hieratic tones which deny, even in their conditionality, the full complexity of the necessary relation between man and world as expressed in our: . . . old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable.

(VIII)

The suggestion of a potential and fully realisable paradise on earth is more subtly expressed in stanza II, where metaphor creates a human response to the world which is unmediated, yet recognisable: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; . . .

(II)

the abstract emotions being concrete in their metaphorical association with the rhythms of the natural world. And this interaction of the human and the other is brought into a node in: . . . gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights.

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But Stevens makes this world, in the present, a paradise. In the personification, ‘Death is the mother of beauty’16, the abstraction, in governing the verbs which follow, is given a concreteness which creates of the argument of the poem, a ‘felt’ presence, yet this world is an innocent one, in which the natural force of life bears a subdued hostility towards its children: She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

(V)

The natural world is innately sympathatic with the human, and in their coherence is poetically implied a sense of Eden. Stevens was to undergo an important poetic metamorphosis in Harmonium subsequent to these two early poems. For the feeling of the world as paradise, in which we are as innocent youths, was to be changed by a sense of a world which is incomprehensible, which bears no innate relation to ourselves, from which we are, by the very powers of that expression of delight and desire which is music, paradoxically separated. The pressure behind the later poems is to discover the approach to a noeud vital with the world, which is the suggested premise of ‘Sunday Morning’. The celebration of the beauty of the particulars of a world, which in ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ are in a rhythmic process, ordered and coherent, will be complicated by the realisation that the ‘berries’ are seen to have an infinite number of aspects, that they, or any other particular, exist not emblematically but in and for themselves, and that the nature of our relation to them must be imaginatively discovered. The process of the world is an incipient chaos in which the flux of life is understood only in the relative particulars, of which we ourselves are but a relative part: I measure myself Against a tall tree. I find that I am much taller, For I reach right up to the sun With my eye; And I reach to the shore of the sea With my ear Nevertheless, I dislike


13

The way the ants crawl In and out of my shadow. (‘Six Significant Landscapes’, CP, p. 74, III) So Stevens sought to measure his world by sight, and in so doing, realised that ‘To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.’17

III Stevens’ discussion of the imagination’s method of poetically drawing the resemblances between objects, in ‘Effects of Analogy’, provides this definition: Every image is the elaboration of a particular of the subject of the image. 18 Analogy is composed of ‘these pictorializations of poetry’. 19 There are two points to be stressed here; first, the emphasis on the particularity of the subject elucidated by the image; and second the insistence on the visual element of analogy. Throughout his career Stevens believed that the poet’s engagement with reality was, on the primary level, visual. The poet must be a seer, in this literal sense. To see was to be.

(CP, p. 297)

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight. (CP, p. 373) The world must be measured by eye.

(CP, p. 204)

The last line gives credence to Doggett’s assertion that, ‘Stevens’ recurrent pun [shows that] he apparently sees the identification of I and eye as only a natural identification of ego with vision. 20 As Stevens himself says; ‘Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.’21 The poet thinks visually, and puts into speech the analogies between the images of the particulars of experience. ‘The tongue is an eye’, 22 for ‘the aspects of earth of interest to a poet are the casual ones, as light or color, images’. 23 It is revealing to read the letters of the young Stevens, and to discover him, in the tranquility of his afterthought, putting into words his

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observations on long walks with a freshness and an immediacy which belie the lapse in time between perception and expression. This evening walked to turnpike and back. Standing on the bridge saw a fine rainbow: green, blue, yellow, and pink: four distinct layers of pink. The sky cleared and was limpid and pure crossed by all the usual light white clouds and larger, more somber, purple, fringed with crimson edges. . . . The distinction between perennial: everlasting peas and sweet peas is that the latter have a scent, frail and delicate. Larkspur is various and is to be known by the rabbit-head-like corolla, if it be the corolla; taking the outer leaves as the calix – generally purple or mixed purple and pink etc.24 There are many more entries, in the journals, of this nature. The keenness of the eye, and sharpness of memory focusing on the particulars of experience – these are obviously gifts Stevens was blessed with, allowing him to, in Cézanne’s words, ‘render the image of what we see’. 25 It is not surprising thus to notice Stevens’s obvious sympathy with painting, nor surprising to read in ‘The Relations between Poetry and Painting’26 of the artistic closeness of painter and poet; so much so that their arts are fundamentally a unity. His interest in painting was to be through the course of his poetic life more than amateur. We would notice, however, in Harmonium, without the assistance of later prose works, that Stevens’ poetry is heavily influenced by modern painting; for example, by the Impressionists in ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’: The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green And in its watery radiance. . . . (CP, p. 99, I) As Michel Benamou says, in his essay27 on the relations to painting in the poetry; ‘Presumably, [Stevens] never saw the whole series of the “Water Lilies” in the Orangerie Museum, for he never went to Paris. Yet all the feeling of the old painter of Giverny for the fleeting reflections of light in iridescent water inspires this picture of the ocean.’ 28 But as Benamou goes on to point out, in this Impressionist poem we are shown what amounts to the ‘passive principle of change’.29 The poem is paradoxically a reductive one. That is, the human imagination, because of such connotative preciosity seems limp; an ‘esprit batard, l’ignominie’ (CP, p. 102, V). There are no things, no particulars in this poem. It is an


15

achievement of a perverse order, creating richness despite absence, or more accurately, because of absence. The imagination like the sea seems to reflect, not order; forever about to be washed away by the magnitude of connotation. ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ published in 1924,30 was the last written of the Harmonium poems. To it we shall return. Despite the emphasis of the Impressionists on the eye’s innocence, they did not realise its complete liberation. Rather, it is in Cubism that ‘the imagination is the active principle which transforms and extends the object by multiplying resemblances’.31 Thus if Monet, for example, rendered the shifting emphasis of light on the natural world, he was still tied to the artifice of the single-point perspective, unable artistically to approach objects in space, in their quiddity. It was Picasso, in Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon (1907) who ‘created a new system of indicating three-dimensional relationships that would no longer be dependent on the convention of illusionistic, one-point perspective’.32 Here was a true freedom of perception, one which Stevens praised in the essay ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’: ‘To take Picasso . . . it may be said of him that his spirit is the spirit of any that seeks to be free. A superior obsession of all such spirits is the obsession of freedom.’33 Cubism, in its early analytic phase, attempted to render objects in their manifold form, to express the multiple viewpoints which compose our perceptions. With the ability to combine several points of view in a single image, to suggest as many aspects of the existing particulars as possible, the later synthetic Cubists were able to draw forth the analogies between images, to show the interrelation between facts. This radical relativism was the artistic expression of the constant metamorphosing of the actual. It was the attempt then to express the existence of the particulars of reality as they were in themselves, and as they were to each other and the observer. Following the Impressionists, and in particular Cézanne, the Cubists treated objects ‘that were as nearly emptied of symbolic content as possible’.34 We know that Stevens saw the New York Amoury Show of 1913, the introductory exhibition of Cubist work in America.35 But even without this biographical information, we can gather from the earliest poems the lasting impression that Cubist thought was to make on his work. 36 Herein was a new way of seeing (‘Accuracy of observation is accuracy of thinking’),37 by which the particulars that made up the actual could be accurately perceived in their existence. There is no Truth; there are many relative truths. ‘Definitions are relative. The notion of absolutes is relative.’38

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But this analysis of reality by ‘exploding the object into prismatic fragments’,39 this ‘hoard of destructions’ (‘Man with the Blue Guitar’, CP, 173, XV) led to a severe freedom. The perceiver must synthesise his fragmentary perceptions; the poet must unfold the harmonious interrelations of objects, each to the other, and to himself in the single image. Thus, in Parts of a World the poem ‘Study of Two Pears’: Opusculum paedagogum, The pears are not viols, Nudes or bottles. They resemble nothing else. (CP, p. 196, I) So ‘the pears are not seen as the observer wills’. The poet is responsible for ordering ‘the dreadful sundry of this world’ (‘O Florida, Venereal Soil’, CP, p. 47), which he himself has revealed. So, in ‘Floral Decorations for Bananas’ (CP, p. 53) the poet attempts to mediate these: insolent, linear peels And sullen, hurricane shapes; with something ‘serpentine’, unable to bear ‘Blunt yellow in such a room’. The particular must be related to its environment (‘Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations or interactions’).40 But the fruit ‘hacked and hunched’ will not give itself to plums in an eighteenth-century dish. That places it in a falsifying ‘precious light’. In fact the balance necessary for such threatening life is not achieved. The final decorations are leaves from the Carib tree; their overwhelming existence fails to mediate the bluntness of the banana, and offers instead a new and different odiousness: Fibrous and dangling down, Oozing cantankerous gum Out of their purple maws . . . . The bananas are lost to sight, and the failure of synthesis leaves us with a new set of squirming facts to understand. Before we can understand the interrelationship of the facts in the world, we must understand the primary relationship of our self to those particulars. It is from this point that we can create the metaphors of art. Thus in ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’, the observer attempts to synthesise


17

the relationships of twenty men, a bridge and a village. Yet to resolve the elements of the world by the abstraction of stanza 1 is to start falsely, so that the mind is led in stanza 3 to tautology. The process should have begun with the particulars; thus the fifth stanza uses the definite article: The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. (‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’, CP, p. 19) as against the indefinite articles of stanzas 1 and 3. Yet ‘the meaning escapes’; we still have not seen the thing-in-itself, not reached the fullest analysis of the particular. The poem’s last two lines are the summation of the process of reduction to the base of being. Run together with the second and fourth phrases, the total critique of the decreasing abstractions of the first, third and fifth stanzas read: This is old song That will not declare itself . . . That will not declare itself Yet is certain as meaning . . . The first white wall of the village . . . The fruit trees . . . A poem will not declare itself; it must be a discovery, certain as meaning in the particulars of the real. The point of reduction should be the point of departure from which the understanding of reality unfolds.41 And to understand the real with its interactions is to understand the self as some part of it, to be even if momentarily a related part of the world: A man and a woman Are one. A man and woman and a blackbird Are one. (‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, CP, p. 93, IV) Of ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, Stevens says: ‘This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or ideas, but of

18


sensations.’42 The poems are recreations of the ebb and flow of the self in the fluctuation of experience. So: I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds, is the expression of one specific moment rendered through the perception of that point in time when the mind is divided, unsure of itself. In the total set of poems each works against the other, not in a simple series of opposites, but in a shifting range of assertions which are qualified and restated, each poem true in its relativity. And within each poem there is the same interaction of statements and images; suggesting that the movement of life is realised through the shifting of its particulars. Thus in I, the eye of the bird, held in the imaginative eye of the perceiver, and thrown into relief by the surrounding blankness, seems in its irreducibility to give a point of reference, ordering the world. Yet IX suggests that the areas of perception are limited and enscribable, that there is hence no single dominating viewing-point. In III the blackbird is synecdoche for the indefinable process of earth whose principle of constant change the imagination can only approach, by attending to the flux of particles (cf. ‘Domination of Black’). For the earth is never dead, even in stasis its colours, expressed in relations to each other, are thrown into life. The darkness of afternoon and the promise of an unending whiteness (‘And it was going to snow’), heighten the effect of the blackbird sitting in the boughs of the evergreen tree. In VIII the bird is that base of reality from which even the most ‘noble accents’ are generated; while in X its beauty can delight even those poets of pleasantest sound in its spontaneity. So the relations between the parts of reality are understood in XII in a manner which is beyond logic. For here the imperative ‘must’ is a referentially false one, partaking not of a strict line of cause and effect, but of imaginative suggestion: The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

(XII)

Similarly in VI, the poet cannot explain the ‘indecipherable cause’ of his mood; cannot therefore state the nature of the emotion. Rather, all


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that is offered is the mysterious relation of subject to object, which the traveller of XI, in his splendid self-enclosing ‘equipage’ fears so much. So in VII the poet exhorts the ‘thin men of Haddam’ to imagine not ‘gold birds’, false idealisations or perfections, but to look to those living women the blackbird walks around. The delight of the world is, after all, to be found in its transitoriness, in its temporal interrelations; just so, the whistle’s beauty of V can only be treasured because it comes out of and goes into silence. As in a Cubist painting the poem’s significance is drawn from the juxtaposition of interrelated images of particulars, synecdoches from which we can induce the overall significance. Each image is clearly denoted; like the blackbird in X, implicitly rebuking the excesses of connotive poetry, each image acts as the expression of a sensation, a perception. The poem’s visual nature partakes of that quality of painting which Stevens praised because ‘instead of seeing the thing seen, you see the thing itself’. 43 Finally, the abolition of an overall plot, of a beginning and an end informing the movement of the poem, directing from point to point the reader’s mental steps, creates a relativity which denies a single centre of mental perception. The poem gives the illusion of having the randomness and spontaneity of life itself, in offering moments of imaginative ordering. Each way of looking at the blackbird is valid in itself, yet is suggestively qualified by any of the other ways. The object, emptied of ‘symbolic content’, is alive to multiple interpretations, discoveries and rediscoveries. Such a poetry is, in Pound’s words: a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres and the like, but equations for the human emotions.44 Or as Kenner says of imagist verse: The barest shorthand imports the reader into the situation and he can then be trusted to know what feelings are expected of him: feelings that in any case he is itching to release.45 Or, finally, in the words of T. E. Hulme: We no longer believe in perfection, either in verse or thought, we frankly acknowledge the relative.46


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IV The interaction between the theories of poetry and painting was evident in the early years of this century; poets themselves were quick to draw attention to it: Imagism was, as (Pound) had said, sculpture or painting just forcing itself into words – making the poem tend to brevity in the most talented hands, but not necessarily brief; it was poetry which produced an Image, and the Image was usually dependent as much upon imagery of vivid natural detail as upon metaphor or analogy.47 Or as Pound himself described Vorticism, son of Imagism: The English parallel Movement to Cubism and Expressionism. Imagism in Poetry.48 Stevens, too, was impressed by Imagism and the possibilities it allowed for the direct treatment of things, of the particulars which compose, in their interdependent existence, the actual. It was a theory which could ensure that ‘poetry (would) always be a phenomenal thing’.49 More explicitly he remembered that when Harmonium was in the making there was a time when I liked the idea of images and images alone, or images and music of verse together.50 For Imagism . . . is not something superficial. It obeys an instinct. Moreover, imagism is an ancient phase of poetry. It is something permanent. 51 Imagism was important to Stevens; it could help to satisfy his need to fill the empty parentless house of the contemporary world. The things of reality could replace the dead gods; by living in the here and now, ‘in the instant, and the concrete, and in “things” – things glimpsed in the moment before the mind has had time to generalise and catergorise them’. 52 The extraordinary degree of poetic skill that Stevens was blessed with, allowed him to create in the most finely wrought Imagist poems of Harmonium the illusion of spontaneous moments of acute perception.


21

He seems to overcome that difficulty Williams described in the Prologue to Kora in Hell (1918): the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose.53 Stevens creates, in his art, the senses in the moment of reaction to the processes of reality. So that: Whether it be in mid-sea On the dark, green water-wheel, Or on the beaches, There must be no cessation Of motion, or the noise of motion, The renewal of noise And manifold continuation . . . (‘The Place of the Solitaires’, CP, p. 60) Stevens mastered very early54 the Poundian image ‘[presenting] an emotional complex in an instant of time’,55 a complex which ‘gives the sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art’.56 So in ‘The Load of Sugar Cane’ (CP, p. 12), he achieves a liberation of the mind through the presentation of flowing forces, of ‘things in motion, motion in things’,57 in the fluidity of his verse. The poem describes an arc, moving forward in its intricate resemblances (boat to water, rainbows to birds, whistling of the wind to the sounds of the ‘Kildeer’ as they rise) from the generalised ‘going of the glade-boat’, until with the present participle ‘turning’ in line eight it curves back in to the bright particularity of the boatman’s red turban. That red presence sets the Kildeer in motion, and ends arbitrarily and spontaneously the curve of the poem. The movement of forces, each suggesting the other, is the poem’s subject, as it moves forward gathering force after the pauses of restated lines (two and three, and five and six); giving the impression of relations with its internal and concealed rhymes (going, flowing, flowing; rainbows, rainbows; turban, boatman). The effect is to suggest the rhythm of the natural world, set into motion by the glade-boat going like flowing water, which then is disrupted paradoxically by the boatman’s intrusive

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red turban. The images, in R. P. Blackmur’s apt phrase ‘compound a mystery’, 58 by not describing, but presenting. The ‘things’ of the poem meet in fellowship, then ‘peculiar and perfect, find their release’. 59 In ‘Domination of Black’ the same poetic method (resemblances breeding resemblances enforming the thought) brings living things into a fellowship from which there is no release. By the fire at night the imagination recreates, in the flames, the reds and golds of autumnal bushes and the fallen leaves blown in a twilight wind. As the dark colour of the hemlock ‘comes striding’ he remembers the ‘cry of the peacocks’. And They swept over the room Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks Down to the ground.

(CP, p. 8)

He tries imaginatively to reconstruct the occasion of their cry. Was it directed against the twilight, or the whirling of the leaves, or the hemlocks themselves? The cry the peacocks utter is against none of these individually. It cannot be placed in a point of time, isolated from the turbulence of which it forms a part. That sound marks the process, the flight of things, by which the leaves in the wind, the tails of the peacocks, and the hemlocks are all caught up in the flames of the imaginative fire of autumn. These particulars, distinct in themselves, are brought into relation in a vortex of destructive energies. The movement of the verse is, rather than seems to be, that whirling towards annihilation: Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? The imagination, like the peacocks, is whirled in a violence of destruction, as the verse circles back, against the downward flight of the peacocks, to the hemlocks, trying to establish a point of stasis from which the process of events can be logically reconstructed, and rationally understood. But just as the hemlock and the night are parts with the burning flames and


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bright turning leaves, so too the peacocks are fragments of the inexplicable movement to annihilation. Thus the cry is against this ‘turning’; the changing into or becoming (‘turn into’) which is the frenzied whirl of particulars (‘turn round’) as they are drawn into the node of darkness (thus the ‘hemlock’ which arrest the associative movement of each stanza). So in the last stanza the vertiginous turning takes in the imaginer; the observer is drawn into the process of life: I saw how the planets gathered Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind The poet can no more place his own temporal point in the cycle of the world, than he could mark the exact occasion (the moment, the cause) of the peacock’s cry; hence in his fear he remembers that cry. But against the destructive movement of the world there is the imagination; not an ordering and fixing agent which can say ‘this is here; then there’; rather it can only hope to ‘present’ that flux from which it draws its life. And in that presentation it offers the multiplicity of life: that the planets can only appear because of the night, that the leaves take on their colours because they are dying, that the peacock is beautiful because it is transitory; and finally that imagination itself is like the flames which take on their colours because, eventually, they burn to nothingness. ‘Domination of Black’ has a poetic life in the sense prescribed by William Carlos Williams: A poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.60 Stevens’s engagement with this transitory reality is not confined to any single perception; each movement that brings change, a ‘beginning, not resuming’, brings a fresh demand, a fresh movement. And ‘life is Motion’ (CP, p. 83). Thus, if the Connecticut autumn of ‘Domination of Black’ foretells the poet’s annihilation, the Carolina spring becomes a gift of childhood: Timeless mother, How is it that your aspic nipples For once vent honey? (‘In the Carolinas’, CP, p. 5)

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The sweetness comes only because ‘life is bitter aspic’; yet the force that withers the lilacs brings forth the butterflies: The honey of heaven may or may not come But that of earth both comes and goes at once. (‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, CP, p. 15, VII) The perspective here offers one emphasis on the delicate balance of a world in process. And the mind engaged in that continual change can achieve moments when the image-complex liberates us from our ‘island solitude’, and releases us into the world of particulars, so that momentarily no longer separate, we partake of the dance, the rhythm of life. We experience in poetry a music which proclaims The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom. And of all vigils musing the obscure, That apprehends the most which sees and names, As in your name, an image that is sure. (‘To the One of Fictive Music’, CP, p. 88) The poet celebrates ‘the marriage of flesh and air’ (‘Life is Motion’, CP, p. 83). ‘Nomad Exquisite’ (the title suggesting that joy in the impermanent because it is such) enacts the freedom of the human self in the image-complex. There is delight in the richness of individual lives fulfilling themselves: The big-finned palm And green vine angering for life, (‘Nomad Exquisite’, CP, p. 95) cause in the poet an equal determination to live not apart, but as part. The poem expresses a pseudo-logical relation between the external exuberance, and the creative fire it lights in the perceiving mind. Thus the first two stanzas, syntactically continuous, are introduced by the same line: As the immense dew of Florida while the last two lines conclude with the paradoxical effect So in me, come flinging Forms, flames and flakes of flames,


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suggesting that the alchemical imagination spontaneously responds to the world, and instantaneously achieves the ‘flinging forms’ necessary to express its relation. Moreover, within the poem, Stevens wittily relates this ‘blessed morning’ as ‘meet’, not to his own eye, but to that of ‘the young alligator’, so within the suggested logic of the cause and effect clauses of flora upon mind, he is able to introduce the reptile as being the central point of perception. The poem thus equates the internal relations of the living things of the world with each other, and their relation with us, and draws the human and other worlds together; ironically, through a reptile we momentarily seem to be part again of our first world, realising the inconstant as our paradise. But this poem achieves its effect by the richness of perception being controlled by syntax, holding back the final effect. It is not the ‘pure’ Imagism of juxtaposed perceptions: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough as in Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’.61 Rather it is a poem in which the images are drawn together and stated, in such a manner that the poetic reaction to the world depends as much upon the articulations of syntax as upon the concreteness of the image. There is here the suggestion of the relation of the image to the more traditional forms of verse; forms which, as we shall see, Stevens found necessary in order to achieve as complete an expression as possible of that relation of man to his environment.

V Writing to Ronald Lane Latimer in 1935, Stevens expressed his opinion about the difficulty of maintaining his poetic balance: A good many people think that I am didactic. I don’t want to be. My own idea about it is that my real danger is not didacticism, but abstraction, and abstraction looks very much like didacticism. It may be because the didactic mind reduces the world to principles or uses abstractions . . . Imagism was a mild rebellion against didacticism. However, you will find that any continued reading of pure poetry is rather baffling. Everything must go on at once. There must be pure poetry and there must be a certain amount of didactic poetry, or a certain amount of didacticism in poetry.62

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Stevens did not abandon Imagism during the Harmonium period; but as we saw in ‘Nomad Exquisite’ he wanted to push the possibilities of the image-complex to their fullest limits. Through Imagism he had been able to see in poetry, and to treat things in themselves with respect. But he was obviously equally preoccupied with the poet’s responsibility for providing the sanctions of life. He had to entertain all the possibilities inherent to poetic language that would allow him to replace the vacuum of affirmation created by the vanishing gods. Poetry must achieve as broad and relevant an emotional range as possible in defining the relation of man to a world of discrete particulars. Imagism offered the moments of conjunction with the world, caught and recreated in words; but by its very definition it suggested a limitation of the resources of language, a prescription of the poet’s powers. The image was there to present, but not to explain, to offer the reader the transient perception but not to suggest the place of that recognition of the world in the broadest, most emotionally significant framework of human experience. So above all, the Imagist went in fear of abstractions, of didacticism. There is then the necessity of maintaining a poetic poise; balancing the particular, the relative things-in-themselves, with the poet’s desire to state the sanctions of life, to be in the sense Stevens suggested, didactic. Thus it is that: In a way Stevens was the only poet to take Imagism seriously. That is he took it to its conclusions. The bulk of Imagist poetry was more or less a high-minded game played out in the consciously pregnant silences around the images. It needs an audience to be shocked into exclaiming: ‘How can you say so little?’ and a poet who, with some satisfaction, could turn the question back on the asker: ‘How can you see so little?’ But Stevens, not content with the occasionally wise passiveness the pure Imagist might, with luck, attain, made his poetry out of the problems with which those silences teemed. 63 So the silence around ‘Theory’ (CP, p. 86) suggests the difficulty of giving the full expression to the problems of our relationship to the world: I am what is around me. Our ideas of ourselves come from our surroundings; ‘everything has its origin in externals’. 64


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These, then are portraits: A black vestibule; A high bed sheltered by curtains. (CP, p. 87) The large gesture promised fails to transpire. The externals denote an internal darkness. And the poem is the expression of the failure to draw the self in to any significant relation with the world. Its laconic last line belittles the enterprise of such self-expression: These are merely instances. The poem is, as it were, surrounded by darkness and its silences. To express one’s fullest feeling for the world is to state one’s self in the most complete way possible. But what is that self if it is of: a man of fortune greeting heirs; For it has come that thus I greet the spring. (‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, CP, p. 13) It would seem that the problems of those Imagist silences could hardly be better answered than by that most loquacious and self-conscious of Uncles, a man who, moreover, in his fortieth year no longer feels his relation to the world to be of any vitality; a man who, severed from a physical instinctual love of the earth, feels the need for self-definition to be paramount. ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ (CP, p. 13) is a poem of desire. Or, rather, it is a poem which through its elaborate definitions and qualifications attempts to suggest the possibility of art when the desires of youthful lust have dissipated. In ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ Stevens had established the equation of desire and art: music being the expression of feeling or desire for the beautiful. Out of our creative, as it were sexual desire, comes poetry. But what if the woman we should feel for is no longer young, eminently desirable; has become instead of a sensuous Susanna: Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon.

(I)

To have lost feeling is to have forgone the ability to create poetry, to be married to a faded muse; 65 so

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There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, Like the clashed edges of two words that kill. that destroy each other in that they fail to express beauty, or a feeling for it. And so he ‘mocked her in magnificent measure’, or since it is he who has aged, he who shall greet no more springs ‘was it that I mocked myself alone?’ That ebbing desire for beauty, the would-be cause of poetry, is a loss of the world which gave rise to his muse; for The measure of the intensity of love Is measure, also, of the verve of earth.

(V)

His bloom is gone, rather he, and the woman who is the figuration of his waning desire, are ‘like warty squashes, streaked and rayed’. Within the poem the Uncle ironically attempts to find the alternative to the lost poetry, the creative feeling, of his youth: Remember how the crickets came Out of their mother grass, like little kin, In the pale nights, when your first imagery Found inklings of your bond to all that dust.

(VI)

Which evening scene contrasts poignantly with the ‘firefly’s quick electric stroke’ of the present. But the ‘particulars of rapture’, ‘the crickets’, come forth only when we realise our bond to the ‘dust’, the transience of earth. The tension of the verse is generated by the refusal of the Uncle to accept ‘starry connaissance’, the search for eternity, which the ‘mother of heaven’ implicitly suggests as fit subject for the middle-aged. For the saving awareness of this poem is that, even if the past attempts to realise an immortality in art are all mocked by the living spontaneous earth; Why, without pity on these studious ghosts, Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

(III)

it is precisely because of the sense of separation from that which we would desire, that art can be made. The lustful desire of the elders in ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ is here modified, no longer suggesting that art can give the illusion of immortality to emotion; and yet suggesting still that the desire for the unreachable, a full conjunction with the earth, is a cause of art. For the book of love, the expression of desire for the earth is


too mad a book to read Before one merely reads to pass the time.

29

(IV)

So the opening address of ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, to the ‘mother of heaven’, the muse, so sarcastic here, becomes in ‘To the One of Fictive Music’ the genuinely reverential invocation: Sister and mother and diviner love, And of the sisterhood of the living dead . . . . (CP, p. 87) For it is in our divorce from the world, in our fall from the paradise of ‘Sunday Morning’ into the self-consciousness of distinctness, which creates art. In effect, poetry is the expression of a psychic desire, for a noeud vital which can be realised only in our fictions, in the creations of the imagination. The loss of physical ecstasy is therefore compensated for by the urge to express our lost love, and to define a new one. Music is thus summoned by the birth That separates us from the wind and sea. Yet that music should be, not too like, yet not so like to be Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs The difference that heavenly pity brings. (CP, p. 88) The Uncle will, therefore, be committed to the celebration of the faith of forty, the imagination. To find again, but in words, the relation to the world that is youth’s unconscious gift, he will: quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything For the music and manner of the paladins To make oblation fit . . . . (‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, CP, p. 16, X) But ironically, that self-consciousness makes him aware that the task before him is to rediscover constantly an imaginative energy that will be of the order of his lost sexual desire for beauty, to find ‘bravura

30


adequate to this great hymn’. And if forty-year-olds are to be creative, are to be painting lakes, The ephemereal blues must merge for them in one, The basic slate, the universal hue.

(VI)

Yet that search for prevailing substance is modified; for he must not only quiz ‘all ideas’, but ‘all everything’. And such discovery will not be like ‘the memorabilia of mystic spouts’ watering magic trees, but in the substance of continuously recreative life, seen in its particularity in process. Because the ‘rotting winter rains’ of VIII as it were water the tree which the spring birds with their ‘choirs of wind and wet and wing’ of II seek out. Thus because there is transcience in the particular lives of earth, there is also the tree, ‘the substance which prevails’; and it stands gigantic, with a certain tip To which all birds come sometime in their time. But when they go that tip still tips that tree.

(X)

A tree or staff of life which is the permanence within the rhythm of existence, and that sense of recreative continuity is not only the subject of the poet of forty, but the very cause of it. For all our fictions must be conscious of the real, in its particularity, as the base: Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink, Clippered with lilies scudding the bright chromes, Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog Boomed from his very belly odious chords.

(XI)

We need real frogs in our imaginery pools. Thus, the ‘starry connaissance’ of II has been modified, through the furious sexual star of V, to the keenness of imagination, of sensibility capable of a romanticism, but conscious of the particulars of reality. For heaven’s honey is illusory; imagination directed to its arrival might produce the direct confrontation of the vulgar guffawing centurions beating shrilling tankards on the table-boards, with the tinkling muleteers bringing A damsel heightened by eternal bloom.

(VII)

The compensation for lost paradise comes with the understanding that the creative imagination, in partaking of the changing real, will bring


31

forth from our divorce from the beauty of earth fictions which will suggest a new, and constantly renewing, affair. This ironic realism66 was to be a theme running throughout Stevens’ later work: From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves. (‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’, CP, p. 383) Thus it is that the blue pigeon in XII circles the sky, indistinguishable from it while A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground, Grown tired of flight . . . . (CP, p. 17) But the forty-year-old uncle realises that he can still pursue the origin and course of ‘love’, can still express a much qualified desire for earth, and so can create poetry precisely because: fluttering things have so distinct a shade. ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ is an affirmation of the self in its relation to the transient world. Through accepting, not passively, but imaginatively that which is around us we come to a portrait of the self, finding in separation from the world which we have loved physically and hence unconsciously, the desire to nurture another love: that of the creative spirit. And it is in drawing forth the particulars in their tangibility, that we do justice to our substance, to the existence of living and changing things in the world. The possibility of a recovery of the lost physical world in our creations is enacted in the tenor of the poetry. In ‘Sunday Morning’, nature and man are implicitly, and in such a sense passively, seen as one. Thus the metaphor ‘gusty / emotions on wet roads on autumn nights’. But in ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, VIII, the metaphor of love as a flowering is modified in the further metaphor of Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. Two golden gourds distended on our vines . . . which in turn is qualified by the simile ‘We hang like warty squashes’, which suggests an imminence of man in the natural world. This ironic

32


union is reversed and comically placed by the parodied pathetic fallacy of ‘the laughing sky’, in which the natural world assumes our own qualities. Thus the possible relation of man and natural world is seen as a creative interaction; a transference of energies with grotesque results. The search for the physical thus becomes the endeavour to find a language to mediate it. The poem does no violence to the world of particulars in its didacticism; it bloods the abstractions. As Stevens himself confessed: ‘It is difficult for me to think and not to think abstractly. Consequently, in order to avoid abstractness, in writing, I search out instinctively things that express the abstract yet are not in themselves abstractions.’67 Thus ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ is alive in its concreteness; the verse animating its ideas through metaphor, and requalifying and judging through further metaphor. Shall I uncrumple this much crumpled thing?

(II)

I shall not play the flat historic scale

(III)

An apple serves as well as any skull To be the book in which to read a round.

(IV)

This parable, in sense, amounts to this: The honey of heaven . . . , etc.

(VII)

The truth of metaphor would be vitiated by abstraction plucked from it and deposited before the reader’s mind. We are watching, through the words, the imagination reacting to the particular existences of the world. And through the metaphors the poem generates meaning which has a life on the level of abstract significance, yet lives within the very physical objects and beings described in the verse. So, we can say that here Even the simplest form of metaphor or simile presents us with a special and creative, in fact a concrete, kind of abstraction different from that of (e.g.) science. For behind a metaphor lies a resemblance between two classes, and hence a more general third class. This class is unnamed, and most likely remains unnamed and is apprehended only through metaphor. It is a new conception for which there is no other expression.68 Thus paraphrase would destroy the existence, in the wit, of I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;

(II)


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and would render cumbersome and trite: The honey of heaven may or may not come, But that of earth both comes and goes at once.

(VII)

Stevens, through the creation of this person, with his original poetic voice, has thus achieved a complexity of language which reveals not only the movement of life in its paradoxes, with its actions and reactions of particular discrete existences; but realises the mind attentive to such rhythms. He creates ‘the appearance of “experiences”, the semblance of events lived and felt and [organises] them so [that] they constitute a pure and completely experienced reality, a piece of virtual life’.69 We feel in the verse the nuances and contours of a man questioning the range of his experience. And in the wit and the irony the verse not only opens out to the contradictions and inconsistencies of the rhythms of life, but expresses an affirmation, a joy in the descriptions found to be apt for transient moments of perception. There is an emphasis on the vitality of language, which in its act of searching out, even if unsuccessfully, the answers to affirm the faith of forty, suggests the substance of men which must prevail: Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit Is not too lusty for your broadening. I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything For the music and manner of the paladins To make oblation fit. Where shall I find Bravura adequate to this great hymn?

(IX)

It has been found, in a sense, in the hyperbole, in the grand urgency and energy of the verse, in the irresistible life of the language engaging itself with reality. That Stevens, himself approaching forty when he wrote ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, believed that the affirmation of love for life was not only possible, but seemingly involuntary, is evidenced by the poem he published immediately afterwards. 70 In Oklahoma, Bonnie and Josie, Dressed in calico, Danced around a stump. They cried,

34


“Ohoyaho Ohoo” . . . Celebrating the marriage Of flesh and air. (‘Life is Motion’, CP, p. 83) Life is motion; and here Imagism is the mode most apt for celebrating the unconscious union of man and nature. Because not separated from their world, but still young and one of its celebrants (the stump not only assumes the role of pivot for the dance, but is related surely to the tree of the tenth stanza of ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’) their expression is inarticulate, not highly sophisticated and self-aware. The power of speech is not necessary here. Yet their gift of youthful exuberance, if not seen condescendingly by Stevens, is nevertheless understood as being, in the very dancing and shouting, but a momentary one. The poem’s value rests in exactly that sense of our removal, as spectators, from the swirling unconsciousness of this couple. The great difficulty comes at that moment when cries and shouts no longer dispel the silence; when we must needs find a poetic expression to help us not only understand our loss, but move towards compensating for it.71 Stevens committed himself to this full exploration of the greatest possibilities of a poetic language which could draw the strands of mind and world towards the noeud vital. But the balance of imagination and world was precarious. Ideally ‘the relation between imagination and reality is a question, more or less, of precise equilibrium’,72 yet the relationship fluctuates between the dissipation of the mind into nothingness by a complete, and static agreement with the pure abstract world of ‘The Snow Man’, stripped of all its particulars; and the all-encompassing self of ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’,73 which, even in the loneliest air imaginatively can create a richness: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange. (‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’, CP, p. 65) Stevens never establishes the abstract nature of final relation between mind and world; for it is a constant process, each poem beginning once again the struggle to realise an order between the perceiver and the actual in its flux. To respect the particulars in themselves, and yet to realise in poetry their interrelations, without doing that violence perpetrated by,


35

for example, the jar, whose roundness and smoothness deny the living contours of the sprawling wilderness: It did not give of bird or bush Like nothing else in Tennessee. (‘Anecdote of the Jar’, CP, p. 76) The arbitrary single-point perspective it creates, we know to be utterly incompatible with that freedom of vision expressed in ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. For ‘an isolated fact, cut loose from the universe, has no significance for the poet. It derives its significance from the reality to which it belongs’. 74 The verse, like the jar it describes (we note how the wilderness is effectively excluded from the poem, denied any living presence) is monotonous; achieving a lifeless symmetry with the flat repetition of Tennessee in the last line. The irrelevance of the environment thus is ironically emphasised. The bare and lifeless denotive language denies significance to the qualities of reality, excluding the discovery of resemblances and associations. Through such exclusion the variety and richness of life is distorted. Yet there is an equal excess of connotative language which tends to dissipate the felt existence of the objects in the world through an expression of the quality of words for themselves, thus killing the integrity of poetic language. It is a form of poetic self-regard which denies the concreteness of particulars. Thus that parakeet of parakeets in ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws’. For although his environment consists of ‘aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind’, because he is blind to that tropical sundry, he responds only to his self-absorbed intellect, unmoving and unmoved. Thus the beauty of his forms is grotesquely thrown into relief by this bitter, lifeless environment: Panache upon panache, his tails deploy Upward and outward, in green-vented forms, His tip a drop of water full of storms. (CP, p. 82) Yet this ‘pure intellect’ expanding in its feathered projections, and so celebrating itself and its creations, has a sinister quality. For the undulating turbulant tinges are a façade for ‘a pip of life amid a mort of tails’; or a diseased life amid any tails. For ‘pip’ can mean ‘a disease of poultry, and other birds characterised by a secretion of mucus in the mouth and throat . . . ’ (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), and is by extension ‘applied to a depressed state of mind’.

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The relation between the ‘forms’, or aesthetic projections, so colourful in themselves, and the world about them is, at least, incongruous, at most a suggestion of an art for its own sake. The tails move, the intellect is static. A world of forms which taken on their appearance, distort the world of facts, or conceivably a world of forms distorted by the world of facts. The difference is ultimately irrelevant. The poem leaves open the ambiguity of whether this ‘paradise of parakeets’ is the cause of the diseased environment, or merely its last survivor. The important point is that in either case that paramount relation between art and reality, just as in ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, has not been realised. Stevens’ poems are thus constantly attempting to suggest, even if by exclusion, the nature of that bravura the Uncle desires. Always he is conscious of the conflicting demands that poetry be true to the particulars of reality (for imaginative language ‘applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to detail’)75 while yet creating a sense of the whole world. The poet must therefore be ever concerned with evolving a language adequate to the process of reality; and he must likewise resist the temptation to apply those creations of the abstract intellect, prior conceptions, to his perceptions: didacticism without idealisation. Marius Bewley has suggested that in ‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’, Stevens, establishing the conflict of poet and particular, creates in the portly Iffucan a benign figure who, although perhaps too arrogant, is ‘a good giant at heart’. 76 Thus, ‘however much the Azcan seems to fail the function he ought to be performing, the blame lies with the truculant inchling who is a most unco-operative reality’. 77 It would seem, rather, that the portly Iffucan (and as Bewley points out this adjective echoes the jar ‘tall and of a port in air’) has pretensions to universality. We need only recall those other Stevens giants of poetic aspiration: the one who is undone by the girl who shall whisper Heavenly labials in a world of gutterals. It will undo him. (‘The Plot Against the Giant’, CP, p. 7) or that musician, fatly soft And wildly free, whose clawing thumb Clawed on the ear those consonants. (‘Jumbo’, CP, p. 269)


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to realise that the portentous Iffucan is a distorter of reality, a squasher of inchlings. And this particular demands that it be treated not as one element in the pretensions towards universal truth of the damned universal cock, whose egocentricity extends even to the sun: ‘blackamoor to bear your blazing tail’. Thus the cry of indignation: Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. Your world is you. I am my world. (‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’, CP, p. 75) And we notice that it is the inchling, the particular, which bristling achieves what might be called the creative art; he bristles in these pines, Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs. . . . The universal cock is left with his nonsensical hoos78 as a sign of incoherence (judged comparatively with ‘Life is Motion’ and ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ above), a strong come-down for a potential universaliser. And we remember, at this point, Stevens’ warning: ‘No fact is a bare fact, no individual fact is a universe in itself.’ The individuality of ourselves and the inchlings must be synthesised; but not on the terms imagined by Iffucan. One cannot help but think that the charm of this poem (and the poignance of many other Stevens creations) is added to by the probable identity of real and fictive poet (both of them portly); an example of self-parody which is consistent in his work. The poet thus as universaliser is mercilessly derided. And yet, as creator of order, he must keep returning to the world; always endeavouring to suggest in his art the interrelations between the particulars. Thus, in ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ (CP, p. 64) the tone which commences the funeral proceedings is one of confident imperiousness; yet what emerges is a series of comically juxtaposed incongruities. Both the muscular roller of big cigars whipping libidinous curds in kitchen cups who radiates a vulgar sexual energy, and the wenches dawdling in ‘such dress as they are used to wear’ suggest an indifference to the transience of life. Yet the boys bringing ‘flowers in last month’s newspapers’ imply, without overt statement, the presence of that fact. And these ironies are explained by the direct command Let be be finale of seem

(CP, p. 64)

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paralleling the previous imperatives of the stanza (Call . . . bid him . . . let the wenches . . . Let the boys . . .); yet it is an imperative which carries an undertone of passivity (‘Allow that’ . . .). The promise, thus, of explanation is flirted with; the final answer, the rationale behind such events, the only emperor, the universal imperative – is that of cream. As Stevens said in a letter, ‘Ice cream is an absolute good.’79 The implication being, of course, that there is no absolute except that of process, and intrinsic to that process, pleasure. Stevens has thus, in one metaphor, poetically created that paradox which animates ‘Sunday Morning’; and at the same moment implied his own inability to explain any further the seemingly chaotic interdependence of sexual energy and death. The poet cannot give meaning to such events in universal absolutes: If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. The pause at the end of the first line allows expectation to be aroused, which is then immediately deflated. And that letting down of hopes is enforced by the crudeness of the rhyme. So the last command is that we let the lamp of imagination affix its beam upon these facts; in all their difficulty, evading full definition, they must be the basis of art. The failure to achieve completeness of definition, to order the world as its intelligence, is the source of our poetry. For: the process of living is incomparably more complex for human beings than for even the highest animals; man’s world is, above all intricate and puzzling. The powers of language have set it apart from that of other creatures. Yet, only through that power to articulate, can we approach the noeud vital with the world. The paradox offers itself for comic treatment. Susanne Langer, in her chapter on comedy in Feeling and Form, suggests that the comic ‘expresses the elementary strains and resolutions of animal nature, the delight man takes in his special mental gifts that make him lord of creation’. 80 Crispin, we would note for our purposes, fails to achieve that status; yet he is able to achieve a hard-won fatalism which allows him to step in and drop ‘the chuckling down his craw, / without grace or grumble’ (CP, p. 45). But if the comic hero of ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ fails to become lord of creation, the comic


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spirit of the poem would seem to agree with Susanne Langer when she writes: What justifies the term ‘comedy’ is not that the ancient ritual procession, the Comus, honouring the god of that name, was the source of this great art form . . . but that Comus was the symbol of a fertility rite, and the god it celebrated a fertility god, a symbol of perpetual rebirth, eternal life.81 And in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, Stevens celebrates the fertility of earth in a manner unparalleled even by himself: Scenting the jungle in their refuges, So streaked with yellow, blue and green and red In beak and bud and fruity gobbet-skins, That earth was like a jostling festival Of seeds grown too fat, too juicily opulent. (CP, p. 32, II) Too opulent, we hasten to notice, for Crispin, whose unenviable task is to find the text of life, and there to create a . . . mythology of self, Blotched out beyond unblotching. . . . (CP, p. 28, II) For his burning desire is for relentless contact with the realest reality, the ultimate on which his poems could be based. And so he savored rankness like a sensualist. . . . He gripped more closely the essential prose As being, in a world so falsified, The one integrity for him, the one Discovery still possible to make . . . (CP, p. 36, III) His desire is to see the world afresh, to confront an untainted reality, and make a new intelligence prevail. That new intelligence derives, of course, from his soil. Crispin will seize the particulars and write their

40


great hymns, respecting them in themselves. A desire which Stevens had voiced elsewhere: Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze, that reflects neither my face nor any inner part of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing. (‘Nuances of a Theme by Williams’, CP, p. 18, I) And each man must be poet of his own land: The man in Georgia waking among pines Should be pine-spokesman . . . . (‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, CP, p. 38, IV) And each must be attentive to ‘smart detail’: The melon should have apposite ritual, Performed in verd apparel, and the peach, When its black branches come to bud, belle day, Should have an incantation.

(IV)

Yet such commitment to the world exposes the human being to the potentially comic situation; it leaves him subject to ‘chance event’, let ‘the rabbit run, the cock declaim’ (CP, p. 39). This is the exact page, the text, not gloss of life. Crispin’s realism is then an acceptance of things within his actual eye; and dismissing the conditionals of his prolegomena he commits himself to that which is here and now. A theory easier than its practice. For that unsponsored wilderness will not acquiesce to the poet’s words: . . . now this thing and now that Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, Little by little . . . . (CP, p. 40, V) The soil is sovereign and from it our ideas should come, and returning in poetry describe the very things in themselves. Yet The words of things entangle and confuse. The plum survives its poems. (CP, p. 41, V)


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The objects survive the poem, evading constantly our approaches; coloured by our obliquities never seen in themselves in our words. Yet this demise, this poetic defeat, can be no more than, for Stevens, comedy. The return to salad beds and quilts is after all a personal fate. The situation will not allow of a universality that is tragic. The guiding rationale of such existence is not that of Fate, but of ‘fate’, of individual fortune. No more than in ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’, nor ‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’, can the poet describe, and so create out of the particulars, an abstract law with its universal applications. What is what should be, and therefore let seeming to be achieve its end, in existence. Why Should he lay by the personal and make Of his own fate an instance of all fate? What is one man among so many men? What are so many men in such a world? (CP, p. 41, V) For nothing but process is permanent; each man is created by his relation to his environment, is limited by his own perceptions, can be only what is around him. And as that environment in its vigour changes, there is the melancholy but not tragic question: Can one man think one thing and think it long? Can one man be one thing and be it long? (CP, p. 40, V) But it is precisely because there is change that the creative energies arise. The vital continuity is thus celebrated; life is in its movement. And because the plum survives its poems, because the words entangle and confuse, Stevens as poet, must be forever reapproaching the physical, constantly attempting to realise the flux of particular life. The difference of consciousness that heavenly pity brings, generates the unappeasable urge to recreate in our art the lost noeud vital. To see that as futile or tragic is to deny a viable openness before the uncongenial world which we are incessantly involved with; attempting to realise in it our own fortunes, our own possibilities of self-discovery and growth in change. So if Crispin is defeated by the entanglements of words, and retreats to his cabin, he is not sterile: . . . Good star, how that to be Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries! (CP, p. 42, V)

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If the comedy deflates his poetic pretensions in describing in elaborately hyperbolic language his children as poetry, that only infers a dignity of potentially creative vitality to language, suggesting the complexities of poetry. Out of marriage to the ‘prismy blond’ comes no reduction of difficulty. For each new life is creativity in a particular form, denying per se the idiocies of generalisation and idealisation. Crispin’s real triumph is that assertion of comic spirit which accepts the ever-increasing uncertainties which the rhythms and fluctuations of experience generate: Four daughters in a world too intricate In the beginning, four blithe instruments Of differing struts, four voices several In couch, four more personæ, intimate As buffo, yet divers, four mirrors blue That should be silver, four accustomed seeds Hinting incredible hues, four self same lights That spread chromatics in hilarious dark, Four questioners and four sure answerers. (CP, p. 45, VI) Crispin has added to the variety of creation. Four more imaginers, not passive reflectors, who in the questioning confidence of their youthfulness add colour to the hilarity of such darkness around him. And Stevens leaves the resolution to this anecdote, as it should be, open and unsettled. Crispin accepts his relation to the world as a fatalist. In the portentous accents and syllables of different lives there is the suggestion of the recreative vitality of the natural world which achieves a purity which is of a bravura adequate to the great hymn; the sounds of music . . . coming to accord Upon his lap, like their inherent sphere, Seraphic proclamations of the pure Delivered with a deluging onwardness. (CP, p. 45, VI) We may note simply the manner in which sexual or procreative energy is suggestively inextricable from an accord that is pure and seraphic; achieving an order which is in the variety and onwardness of fertility,


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in the concreteness of life. If we wish to see this as total failure, however, as a defeated confrontation with reality not brought to book, a fanciful illumination of plain and common things, And so distorting, proving what he proves Is nothing, what can all this matter since The relation comes, benignly, to its end? (CP, p. 46, VI) And may, Stevens adds, the story of each man perhaps be so ‘clipped’ or, remembering that ‘barber’s eye’ (CP, p. 27), aesthetically ordered. The poem is comic, and as such, a celebration of continuity. Crispin’s ‘relation’ will, of course, be in time ended, but his daughters are still to proliferate, to increase the hues of life. And it is, after all, the journey not the arrival that matters. For Crispin has realised, after so many false starts, what the real aesthetic should be: respect for that which is other, a sense of veneration for the thing in itself for itself. His introspective voyage has brought him to an accord with the world on the right terms; to accept that The green fish pensive in green reeds Is an absolute. (‘Montrachet-Le-Jardin’, CP, p. 263) If we feel, as does Roy Harvey Pearce, that ‘particulars get in the way of implicit generalisation – the sense of detail, however much imaginatively informed, in the way of implicit dialectic’82, we deny the value which ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ suggests. For in the nature of this comedy we come to realise that dialectic will lead to no final solution, or rather to the understanding that there can only be in continuous human vitality the suggestions of harmony with the world. The poem exists then in its openness, in the ‘paradise of meaning’ generated by the rich comic co-existence of its words. Thus Stevens said of ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’; ‘What was in my mind was to play on that sound throughout the poem . . . the letter C is the comedian’.83 The principle of comic confusions is thereby contained in the language, entangling and confusing Crispin in a force of life given those particular forms. The words are the energy of the world in this sense. And this is no bad thing, for the excess of such poetic language suggests an excess of life, the soil being for Stevens, like Crispin,

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his intelligence. And in reading the poem we gather not reflections of the things of the world but feel a transmission of the creative strength of their energies being acted out in the co-pressures of the language. Thus: Words add to the senses. The words for the dazzle Of mica, the dithering of grass, The Arachne integument of dead trees, Are the eye grown larger, more intense. (‘Variations on a Summer Day’, CP, p. 234, XIV) That conviction is not stated, but enacted in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’. The interactions of complex forces are rather drawn together in the poetry itself, so that the relation of art and life is seen as inextricable, in our style is the expression of our self: He could not be content with counterfeit. With masquerade of thought, with hapless words That must belie the racking masquerade, With fictive flourishes that preordained His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree Of buttons, measure of his salt. (‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, CP, p. 39, IV) The concerns of artistic creations are thus, in the metaphor united with the problems of self-definition, the introspective voyage. And it is in the concreteness of metaphor that the ‘argument’ of the poem is given life; generating a ‘central abstraction’. 84 Ideas are not symbolised by things, but arise from the friction generated by the mind’s contact with particulars in flux. The abstractions [are] so fully charged with the concrete of experience, and the thinking [is] unquestionably faithful to it.85 Abstract statement is therefore present only to be qualified: Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates of snails, musician of pears . . . (CP, 27, I)


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to be comically elaborated upon. Metaphor within the poem thus celebrates not only the incongruity of the world, and our pretended relation to it, but creates a range of associations which give coherence to the work: Crispin as valet, as barber, as musician. So we may note that the ‘musician of pears’ modulates to ‘lutanist of fleas’, and in the process of comic diminution finds that: The whole of life that still remained in him Dwindled to one sound in his ear, Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, Polyphony beyond his baton’s thrust. (CP, p. 28) And in the range of the poem’s language the verse adds to our sense of the world, dramatically miming our experience of it in creating the richness of possibilities. Through the qualities that the words in conjunction express, we induce the particular’s existence. Yet that can never be finally grasped and held firm in our creative effort, so we are always Glozing . . . life with after-shining flicks.

(CP, p. 46)

The final defeat of Crispin is our victory: that we cannot define the plum, that it survives our poems, is the constant source of the desire to create the fullest sense of its qualities, and thereby imaginatively to induce its existence. The comic openness which animates ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ could have been achieved only through a fully conscious and completely honest scrutiny of the real potential of poetic language before reality. And the lasting achievement of the poem is in its praise of the complexity of the world about us. As such, it represents a full artistic recognition of the conclusions of ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’. The irony of that poem had been necessarily expressive of the inherent divorce from the world which the self-consciousness of language creates; for any poetic statement we make draws us away from the world while hopefully offering, at the same moment, the possibility of a psychic or imaginative noeud vital with it. And yet the irony of ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ had been generative; open in the sense that the space driven between ourselves and reality by art ensured the possibility of continual human recreativity. That ironic resignation modulates in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’ to a comic irresolution in which fatalism is indulgent of the full possibilities of life in its openness. We may point up the fuller endorsement of such complexity in the later poem

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by simply noting that the anonymous birds which come to the gigantic tree in ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ achieve full recognition as autonomous centres of creative activity when they become, as it were, the children of Crispin; his music thus of accord. Yet Stevens’ sceptical intelligence, having rejected the myths which had historically mediated reality, had sought from the beginning of his poetic career to realise in poetry the verifiable truths upon which belief could exist. As in ‘Mrs Alfred Uruguay’, to reach the ‘ultimate elegance: the imagined land’ the poet must descend the mountain, ‘intent on the sun’ (CP, p. 249). He must, in other words, come to the particulars and see in his verse the berries from which the wilderness grows. Then the imagination’s creations, the pyramid of belief, as it were, can be built; but from the apex, upwards and outwards. With the denial of that possibility in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, in the escape of the plums, despite all the words in the dictionary, with what as a poet was Stevens left? Throughout the course of Harmonium, he had explored the various forms of poetry with which the fullest rapprochement with reality could be made. He had endeavoured to see the particulars in his words, and yet such denotive poetry was at best a partial and fleeting suggestion of accord; at worst a stripping away of living contours from the wilderness. Yet didactic poetry, the potentially permanent statement of our relation to the world in the broadest terms possible, could not begin to be made until the particulars had been seized in our words. The desire to suggest full consolation, to create the new myths, could never reach full realisation. Each beginning offered only the possibility of failed expectation, or of slight and transient poetic achievement. Such a defeat of the poet as musician of pears, as it was recorded in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, was taken seriously by Stevens. For, two years after the completion of this poem he was to stop writing and publishing for six years. The reason for that silence followed from the implications of the last written poem of the Harmonium volume. If reality escapes our words, what course remains open to us? As if to answer that question Stevens wrote a poem which was the expression of the mind’s forms in words that were the offspring of the imagination’s coupling with itself. Thus in ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ the language takes life from its self-association; the poetry is pure of the taint of a world imposing itself upon the mind. But in the loss of such tension there is a loss of freedom: for the words existing in and for themselves become playthings, incapable of suggesting that possible consolation which could only be achieved, for Stevens, in the statement they


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should seek to make of a relation with reality. And so the imagination is open to the question: What pistache one, ingenious and droll, Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat At tossing saucers – cloudy conjuring sea? C’était mon esprit bâtard, l’ignominie. (‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’, CP, p. 102) Yet implicit within the poem is the realisation that only the other, the real, can generate the possibility of creativity which is freedom. So the poem ends: Then the sea And heaven rolled as one and from the two Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue. The second course Stevens took followed from the first. In that space created by poetry between the self and the world is the freedom out of which art, ‘the bravura’, comes. The failure of past attempts to describe reality allows each new beginning. The emphasis upon that permanence of human creativity in ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, upon the accomplishment and fulfilment of individual particular selves is the ultimate consolation. It is this sense which allows Stevens to stop writing, and yet gives him the freedom to reconsider the nature of poetry’s engagement with the real, to return again to the world. Thus the last printed poem in Harmonium: What syllables are you seeking, Vocalissimus, In the distances of sleep? Speak it. (‘To the Roaring Wind’, CP, p. 113)

Notes The following abbreviations are used: CP NA

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London, 1966). Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (London, 1960).

48 OP LWS

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Stalin on Linguistics and other Essays Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous, edited, with an Introduction, by Samuel French Morse (London, 1959). Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (London, 1967). OP, p. 206. Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 207. Adagia, OP, p. 192. Ibid., p. 164. OP, pp. 236–7. Ibid. Ibid., p. 241. Cf. ‘A Thought Revolved’ (CP, p. 184), published in The Man with the Blue Guitar: The poet striding among the cigar stores, Ryan’s lunch, hatters, insurance and medicines, Denies that abstraction is a vice except To the fatuous.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

The poet in such a world of trivia must nevertheless create, in abstracting the particulars, the necessary fictions. NA, p. 23. OP, pp. 202–16. Ibid., p. 206. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Ibid. Adagia, OP, p. 161. Cf. Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London, 1952): The habit of throwing metaphorical force from noun to verb produces personification. For it must seem that abstraction is personified to some extent as soon as it can govern a verb. (p. 38)

Adagia, OP, p. 160. NA, p. 127. Ibid., p. 129. Frank Doggett, Wallace Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (Baltimore, Md, 1966) p. 52. Adagia, OP, p. 158. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 157. LWS, p. 128. Stevens, quoting from Cézanne’s journals in ‘The Figure of Youth as Virile Poet’ (NA, p. 47). 26. In NA, pp. 160–176. 27. Michel Benamou, ‘Wallace Stevens: The Relations between Poetry and Painting’ in The Achievement of Wallace Stevens, ed. A. Brown and R. S. Haller (Philadelphia, 1962). 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.


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28. Ibid., p. 234. 29. Ibid., p. 238. 30. ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ was published in Dial, LXXVII (July 1924), 51–4. ‘Red Loves Kit’ was the last poem Stevens wrote before his six-year silence, but was, of course, omitted from Harmonium. 31. Benamou, ‘Wallace Stevens: the Relations between Poetry and Painting’, p. 238. 32. Edward Fry, Cubism (London, 1966), p. 14. 33. OP, p. 226. 34. Fry, Cubism, p. 37, on Stevens’ own attitude to language, which seems directly parallel: ‘The word must be the thing it represents; otherwise, it is a symbol. It is a question of identity’ (OP, p. 168). 35. See Robert Buttel, Wallace Stevens: The Making of ‘Harmonium’ (Princeton, NJ, 1967) p. 80. 36. J. Baird in The Dome and the Rook: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Baltimore, Md, 1968), declares that Stevens shunned Cubism, but divulges no information to support this judgement (p. 83). 37. Adagia, OP, p. 168. 38. Ibid. 39. Benamou, ‘Wallace Stevens: the Relations between Poetry and Painting’, p. 237. 40. Adagia, OP, p. 163. 41. Cf. Stevens’ praise for Marianne Moore (LWS, p. 278): ‘(She) is not only a complete disintegrator, she is an equally complete reintegrator.’ Also see ‘The Relations between Poetry and Painting’ (NA, p. 175). 42. LWS, p. 251. Cf. Golding, Cubism: A History and an Analysis (London, 1957) pp. 33–4, quoting Gleizes and Metzinger in Du Cubisme (1911). For Cézanne and the Cubists, ‘painting is a kind of giving pictorial expression to our intuitions’. 43. LWS, p. 134. 44. Quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London, 1951) p. 57. 45. Ibid., p. 67. 46. Quoted in Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London, 1955) p. 5. 47. S. K. Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (Oklahoma: 1951) p. 151. 48. Quoted in ibid., p. 204. 49. LWS, p. 300. 50. Ibid., p. 288. 51. ‘Rubbings of Reality’, OP, p. 258. 52. P. N. Furbank, Reflections on the Word ‘Image’ (London, 1970) p. 84. 53. W. C. Williams, Imaginations, ed. with an Introduction by Webster Schott (London, 1970) p. 14. 54. See Buttel, Wallace Stevens: The Making of ‘Harmonium’, pp. 66–7. Stevens was writing Imagist verse as early as 1909–10. 55. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London, 1968) p. 4. 56. Ibid. 57. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, 1964) p. 10. It is interesting to note that

50

Stalin on Linguistics and other Essays Stevens read Fenollosa’s essay as it appeared in the Little Review of October 1919: Have you seen this month’s Little Review with the quotation from the Chinese? (LWS, p. 215)

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

‘The Load of Sugar Cane’ appeared in Poetry, XIX (October 1912), 1–9. R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (London, 1954) p. 235. Williams, Imaginations, p. 18. Ibid., p. 178. Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems (London, 1961) p. 119. LWS, p. 302. A. Alvares, The Shaping Spirit (London, 1963) pp. 128–9. LWS, p. 305. Cf. J. N. Riddel, The Clairvoyant Eve (Baton Rouge, La, 1965) p. 89; Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (Edinburgh, 1967) p. 44. Both agree that the woman is the ‘Muse’. Cf. Northrop Frye, ‘The Realistic Oriole’, p. 162 in Wallace Stevens, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Marie Borroff (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962). LWS, p. 290. W. K. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (London, 1970) p. 79. S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London, 1953) p. 212. ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’ was published in Others, V (December 1918) and ‘Life is Motion’ with ‘Earthly Anecdote’ in Others, V (July 1919). ‘Earthly Anecdote’ is a prime example of ‘energies’ in language. Stevens said of it, ‘There’s no symbolism in “Earthly Anecdote.” There’s a good deal of theory about it, however, but explanations spoil things.’ (LWS, p. 204). The poem first appeared in Modern School, V (July 1918), p. 193; that is, before Stevens had read Pound and Fenollosa.

71. ‘When one is young everything is physical; when one is old everything is psychic’ (Adagia, OP, p. 167). 72. NA, p. 9. 73. In Ideas of Order Stevens refers to Hoon, in a tone of bitter disillusionment, the confidence of the Harmonium Hoon’s imagination now being suspect: . . . And then There’s that mountain-minded Hoon, For whom desire was never that of the waltz, Who found all form and order in solitude, For whom the shapes were never the figures of men. Now, for him, his forms have vanished. (OP, p. 121) 74. ‘On Poetic Truth’, OP, p. 235. 75. Adagia, OP, p. 176.


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76. Marius Bewley, ‘The Poetry of Wallace Stevens’ in The Achievement of Wallace Stevens, p. 147. 77. Ibid., p. 150. 78. Cf. ‘hoo’ as the expression of inarticulacy in ‘Life is Motion’ or ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘It Must Be Abstract’ III, wherein the ‘hoos’ are part of life’s nonsense. 79. LWS, p. 341. 80. Langer, Feeling and Form, p. 330. 81. Ibid., p. 331. 82. Roy Harvey Pearce, ‘Wallace Stevens: the Life of the Imagination’, in Wallace Stevens, ed. Marie Borroff, p. 116. 83. LWS, p. 294. 84. Wimsatt and Beardsley, The Verbal Icon, p. 79. 85. F. R. Leavis, ‘Judgment and Analysis: Notes in the Analysis of Poetry’, reprinted in A Selection from ‘Scrutiny’, compiled by F. R. Leavis, vol. 1, p. 231.

2 On the Use of the Sonnet in Romeo and Juliet, or ‘But Where’s the Bloody Horse?’*

In this paper, I want to think about the use of the sonnet form within a specific context, namely Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. And I want the word ‘use’ to explain not only how the form operates within the play but also why. In what ways is the sonnet dramatically useful – or even necessary? Let me start by laying down two qualifications: first, I shall think only in terms of reading the play. The reaction of an audience to the experience of hearing a sonnet raises questions (albeit very important ones) beyond the scope of this paper. The second qualification is this: my interest is confined to the sonnet’s formal existence; that is to say, I am not here concerned with the varieties of rhetorical devices which are integral to the Elizabethan development of the form. I am therefore proposing a considerable limitation of interest in the hope, nevertheless, that the value of so confining the argument will prove worthwhile.1 I shall take as a starting point H. A. Mason’s book Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love.2 I think this is the sort of work one could recommend to undergraduates studying literature because of its rare desire to force the reader into tacit argument with the author. Shakespeare, for Mason, is not a given; we have to prove him, as it were. And in the case of Romeo and Juliet, Mason is particularly helpful in that his argument about the play fortuitously brings the question of the sonnet into discussion.

* First appeared in The Teaching of Literature in ASAIHL Universities: Proceedings of a Seminar of the Association of South-east Asian Institutes of Higher Learning Held at the University of Hong Kong, 13–15 December 1982, ed. Antony Tatlow (Hong Kong University Press) pp. 63–87. 52

On the Use of the Sonnet in Romeo and Juliet

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Chapter One of the book ends with the following account of the much vexed question of fate/fortune in the play: But all [the play’s] scattered references to fate do not amount to very much; they do not set a stamp on the play. We can therefore say that the first prologue gives us a misleading account of the main interest of Shakespeare in presenting the story, and therefore it would be a relief if the textual critics could step in and give us conclusive evidence that Shakespeare had no part in it; for although no good critic can have been misled, those readers who for other reasons wanted Shakespeare to have written a play about Fate have been all too willing to make the prologue do for what the play conspicuously fails to support. (pp. 22–3) Now Mason is quite right to plunge his reader into thinking of justifications for the Prologue: after all, it gives the game away. However, even if his plea for textual corruption were possible, it is, in fact, quite irrelevant. There are two points to be made here; first, the question of fate or fortune is quite distinct from the formal question of the dramatic status of the Prologue. Now, I take it that Mason wishes to argue against the point of view represented by, for example, the New Cambridge ‘Introduction’3 in which G. I. Duthie puts the malevolent fate argument as follows: ‘Shakespeare does not want us to think of these “accidents” as merely fortuitous. We cannot avoid the impression that he asks us to think of them as intentionally arranged by Fate. Fate deliberately works against the lovers by this means’ (p. xviii). Duthie aggrandises Fate in order to minimise human agency: ‘Logic may insist that Romeo is to some extent blameworthy . . . [b]ut we cannot think that Shakespeare wants us to give logic its head absolutely’ (p. xix). It is this kind of formula for evading the difficult questions I take Mason to be discrediting in his discussion of the Prologue. And one wants to agree with him: we do have to consider how Shakespeare’s art explores such questions. Which takes me on to the second point and back to the Prologue: Mason may feel that qua the dramatic this is poor art, clumsy and unjustified; but he cannot let the fact of what the Prologue says be considered in utter isolation from how it is said. The Prologue is a sonnet: CHORUS:

Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

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From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. The fearful passage of their death-marked love And the continuance of their parents’ rage, Which, but their children’s end, naught could remove, Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.4 To suggest that Mason is here ignoring the obvious could, in another context, lead us on to a discussion about the limitations of criticism; but I would rather let his indifference to matters of verse form point us towards an analysis of form itself. Thus, earlier in the chapter under discussion, Mason rightly ponders the play’s concluding lines: A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show his head. Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd. For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo. (V.3.305–10) and passes the following judgement: ‘That Shakespeare’s mind had left the play by this time is made clear by the perfunctory words spoken to wind things up . . . ’ (p. 20). Yes, well what the Prince says can be so described but, again, how he says it should make us think that Shakespeare’s mind had done anything but leave this play: the last six lines consist of a quatrain as found in a Shakespearean sonnet and a couplet which, of course, concludes that type of sonnet. Thus, just as we are forced to ask why the sonnet in the play’s opening, so we cannot ignore the formal dimensions of its conclusion. More: we have to think again of this conflict, if conflict it be, between what is said and how it is said; that is, we tend to think of the sonnet in Romeo and Juliet as belonging to the lovers and only to the lovers. Which is both true and not true. And that may be the point. I would like, at this stage, to reiterate my position. I am not interested in denigrating Mason’s book which, in fact, I find stimulating (evidently); nevertheless, I am arguing for the formal characteristics of Shakespearean


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(or any) verse. Equally, in no sense am I making claims that my observations about the sonnet are novel; T. J. B. Spencer in the New Penguin Shakespeare sums up the matter with great cogency: There are . . . explanations of the ‘artificiality’ of the love-language in Romeo and Juliet. The sonnet was the most popular form of lovepoetry at about the time that Shakespeare was writing the play. It is probable, indeed, that he was writing some of his own series of Sonnets about that time. Certainly many of the major poets were engaged in imitating Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, which had been published in 1591. A dramatist devising an up-to-date play on passionate love would be likely to take account of the contemporary fashion. There was an agreeable topicality, therefore, in writing several speeches of the play in sonnet or half-sonnet form: Benvolio’s suggested remedy for love (I.2.45–50); Romeo’s analysis of his love for Rosaline (I.2.87–92); the first conversation of Juliet and Romeo (I.5.93–106); the address of Paris at the Capulet tomb (V.3.12–17). The two choruses and the final speech of the Prince (V.3.305–10) are also in this familiar tune of love-poetry. (Introduction, p. 38) Nevertheless, I want to go beyond Spencer’s speculations about Shakespeare’s contemporaneity, his modernity (modishness even). It seems to me that the recognition of the poetry’s rich ‘formal’ life opens up possibilities of comprehending (in all senses of the world) the nature of the play’s dramatic action. And this kind of approach is one way of literating the reader: through the study of form one is made aware of the power of literary language in its mediations, in its transformations, of its own sources. To an extent, I am anticipating my conclusions. In order, then, to justify the assertions of the previous paragraph, let me return to the specific question of the varieties of verse patterns in Romeo and Juliet. And let me return with the observation that the play’s fascination (from this point of view) lies not just in the appearances of the sonnet and its mutant forms but also in the linguistic contexts within which Shakespeare develops the dramatic potential of the quatrain/couplet combination. Now it is beyond this paper’s scope to examine in detail all the verse patterns which structure the play; therefore let me confine analysis to those obvious moments which point up the dramatic function of form. In order to do this, I shall suggest that there is a schema of linguistic patterns which articulates the play’s dramatic meaning; understood in

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its most general terms, I shall posit the schema to be a hierarchy. I assume that this model shall justify itself in the course of the argument: namely that the play’s dramatic pattern develops from the base of prose towards the complex ideal of the sonnet through a set of formal variations. To begin, then.

I

Prose

Prose is first used by those who are demonstrably at the lowest level of the social chain of being; hence the play’s opening scene and equally the Clown in I.2.37: Servant:

Find them out whose names are written here! It is written that the shoemaker should meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter with his nets. But I am sent to find those persons whose names are here writ, and can never find what names the writing person hath here writ. I must to the learned . . .

It is obviously to the point that the Clown is illiterate. However, we should note at the outset that the hierarchy of forms is not necessarily (and certainly not sufficiently) indicative of social status. The role of a ‘writing person’ in the play is complex. The formal sophistication of a speech may be limited (e.g. in prose, kept to the minimum possible) because of a variety of factors. Consider the following examples: (i) In II.4 (arguably from the very beginning, certainly from line 10 on) the scene is spoken predominantly in prose. It is of interest to note, thus, that the most prosaic of the speakers is Mercutio; or rather he uses prose most effectively. That is, Mercutio is alert to the potential mendacity of verbal play; his extravagent prose ridicules the whole sonnet tradition Romeo aspires to: Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura, to his lady, was a kitchen wench – marry, she had a better love to berhyme her – Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so, but not to the purpose. (39–43) Indeed, the point about prose (and about Mercutio one might add) is its being ‘to the purpose’. In that sense we can concede the virtues of the


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prosaic. But this is a double-edged virtue, one which the play presents coldly. If leisure – time undetermined – is arguably necessary for the writing and contemplation of poetry, then prose is of the earth, earthy, because it may be spoken under that pressure which allows a minimum of grace. Thus a second example. (ii)

Mercutio:

No, ’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door. But ‘tis enough. ’Twill serve. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am peppered, I warrent, for this world. A plague a ‘both your houses! Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death! A braggart, a rogue, a villain, that fights by the book of arithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm. (III.1.96–103)

Verbal play here rightly turns on the idea of ‘gravity’; Mercutio is earth-bound and so his prose lingers malevolently; his last direct words to Romeo are direct indeed: Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm. Prose thus responds to the pressure of circumstances upon the speaker. And even when prose indulges in play it seems to be animated by a hostility to the world of verbal ingenuity epitomised by the sonnet. This point will be clearer when we consider the next level of the proposed schema, namely blank verse.

II

Blank verse

Prose, although fairly limited in Romeo and Juliet, has powerful implications. The directness of the prosaic can be understood innocently as the necessary immediate response to certain demands; on the other hand, we realise that the role of the ‘writing person’ can be radically transformed by circumstances. Mercutio’s dying question is both rhetorical and in search of an answer. What the speech makes us realise, therefore, is the very degree to which questions of connotation and denotation are important: a ‘grave man’. A play without play, or, a play of denotation only would be a paradox. Or would it? That may be taking us towards a consideration of the tragic.

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Thus, from this perspective on prose I wish now to consider blank verse, and, in the first instance, my argument for seeing it at this level is simply due to its formal characteristics. The only attribute which necessarily distinguishes blank verse from prose is, of course, its metrical pattern: the iambic pentameter. That blank verse forgoes ‘the artifice of rhyme’5 may be of some significance particularly if we consider the time at which (probably) Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet; i.e. 1595, the period of Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Sonnets, all of which are rhyme-conscious. As Johnson further observed, ‘Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but where the subject is able to support itself.’6I have emphasised the word ‘poetry’ in order to recall to mind the criterion of ‘artifice’ and to suggest that we consider the implications of blank verse’s neutrality when we set it in a context of rhyming patterns. That is to say, we might wish to understand, in the case of Romeo and Juliet, the dramatic needs which blank verse both satisfies and fails to satisfy; in other words, to consider the implications of its prosaic qualities, its lack of artifice. In the light of which, let us consider the following: (i)

Prince:

Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, Profaners of this neighbour-stainèd steel – Will they not hear? What, ho – you men, you beasts, That quench the fire of your pernicious rage With purple fountains issuing from your veins! On pain of torture, from those bloody hands Throw your mistempered weapons to the ground And hear the sentence of your movèd prince. Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word By thee, old Capulet, and Montague, Have thrice disturbed the quiet of our streets And made Verona’s ancient citizens Cast by their grave-beseeming ornaments To wield old partisans, in hands as old, Cankered with peace, to part your cankered hate. If ever you disturb our streets again, Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace. For this time all the rest depart away. You, Capulet, shall go along with me; And, Montague, come you this afternoon, To know our farther pleasure in this case,


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To old Free-town, our common judgement-place. Once more, on pain of death, all men depart. (I.1.81–103) Now the ‘meaning’ of this speech is quite clear: If ever you disturb our streets again Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace. and in its clarity is its meaning. That is, blank verse here is prosaic: its function is to get across a message. We can say that it articulates a necessary response to circumstances as directly as possible. Nevertheless, it is blank verse: the artifice of metre is necessary to its definition. That is to say, Prince Escalus’s use of the medium reminds us of the minimum degree of formal transformation in English verse, so that his language is removed from the demotic aspect of prose (Clowns do not speak blank verse) by the formal demands of the iambic while sustaining a minimum degree of artifice. In this case, blank verse is functional (the medium does not interfere with the message) and socially reinforcing (it is, nevertheless, verse). This fact of duality (prosaic verse: versified prose) is very important and, as we shall see, not unique to blank verse. It is a duality, moreover, of considerable complexity; the transformation from prose to verse is a qualitative transcendence of being: consider the implications of Brutus’s decision to speak prose to the mob in Julius Caesar (III. 2.) and Antony’s to speak blank verse. In a sense, we can suggest that blank verse acknowledges the power of articulated form; the significance of transformation. Why speak this way rather than that? (ii)

The second example may seem to be more complicated:

Mercutio:

O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Over men’s noses as they lie asleep. Her chariot is an empty hazelnut, Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, Time out o’mind the fairies’ coachmakers. Her wagon spokes made of long spinners’ legs; The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers; Her traces, of the smallest spider web;

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Romeo:

Her collars, of the moonshine’s watery beams; Her whip, of cricket’s bone; the lash, of film; Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid. And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love; O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies straight; O’er lawyers’ who straight dream on fees; O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream, Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues, Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are. Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose, And then dreams he of smelling out a suit. And sometimes comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail Tickling a parson’s nose as’ a lies asleep; Then he dreams of another benefice. Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck; And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, Of breaches, ambuscados, Spanish blades, Of healths five fathom deep; and then anon Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes, And being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two And sleeps again. This is that very Mab That plaits the manes of horses in the night And bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs, Which once untangled much misfortune bodes. This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, That presses them and learns them first to bear, Making them women of good carriage. This is she – Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! Thou talkest of nothing. (I.4.51–96)

Now, given the argument’s development so far, this speech may appear to be unclear: prima facie would not the world of fairies and dreams need a form more artificial, more contrived, to set it off from the ‘real’ world, say, of prose? In fact, the irony of the speech is focused upon this disjunction: a dream of reality. And to gauge how successfully Shakespeare develops the potential of blank verse here, consider the context within which


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it evolves. As Romeo, Benvolio and Mercutio approach the masque, their banter, in the first stage, progresses through the tension between Mercutio’s bawdy and Romeo’s tiresome Petrarchanism (1–42), resolving itself into a brief rhyming duel which breaks off thus: Romeo: Mercutio: Romeo: Mercutio: Romeo:

I dreamt a dream tonight. And so did I. Well, what was yours? That dreamers often lie. In bed asleep, while they do dream things true. (italics mine)

Mercutio’s subsequent speech revolves nicely about that exchange, brutally substantiating Romeo’s facile gloss on his pun. For the crucial words are Romeo’s: ‘things true’. And the speech’s irony anticipates Yeats: ‘In dreams begins responsibility’, if we may misinterpret responsibility to suggest ‘indictability’. Mercutio subverts Romeo’s fantasy world and makes the realm of artifice – Her chariot is an empty hazelnut, Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub. Time out o’mind the fairies’ coachmakers. – material: the ‘unreal’ controls the ‘real’, but only in so far as it is actually the ‘real’ minimally transformed: Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck; And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, Of healths five fathom deep . . . It is, I think, Mercutio’s intention to destroy the dream world as innocence: the ideal of the Queen Mab speech is to bring fantasy and reality into an identity. Therefore, in so far as the real is minimally transformed in dream-life, is transformed only to the extent that the material is given an intensity of focus (money, sex and death), blank verse is formally exact: prosaic verse. And indeed, it is startling to recognise that Mercutio’s speech here has more in common with Prince Escalus’s blank verse of I.1.81 or his own dying prose and blank verse of III.1 than to any speech of Romeo’s spoken before those speeches. Mercutio’s death transforms Romeo’s language (cf: II.2.54 with III.3.103).

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Equally, Mercutio’s speech takes us in another direction; from This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, That presses them and learns them first to bear, Making them women of good carriage. to Nurse:

Even or odd, of all days in the year, Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen. Susan and she – God rest all Christian souls! – Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God. She was too good for me. But, as I said, On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen. That shall she, marry! I remember it well. ’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years; And she was weaned – I never shall forget it – Of all the days of the year, upon that day. For I had then laid wormwood to my dug, Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall. My lord and you were then at Mantua. Nay, I do bear a brain. But, as I said, When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool, To see it tetchy and fall out wi’ th’ dug! Shake, quoth the dovehouse! ’Twas no need, I trow, To bid me trudge. And since that time it is eleven years. For then she could stand high-lone. Nay, by th’ rood, She could have run and waddled all about. For even the day before she broke her brow. And then my husband – God be with his soul! ‘A was a merry man — took up the child. ‘Yea,’ quoth he, ‘dost thou fall upon thy face? Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit. Wilt thou not, Jule?’ And, by my holidam, The pretty wretch left crying and said ‘Ay’. To see now how a jest shall come about! I warrant, an I should live a thousand years, I never should forget it. ‘Wilt thou not, Jule?’ quoth he,


Lady Capulet:

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And, pretty fool, it stinted and said ‘Ay’. Enough of this. I pray thee hold thy peace. (I.3.17–50)

is, as it were, a move sideways. It seems to me that the relationship is clear. However, one further point about the Nurse’s use of blank verse should be stressed: she is inextricably bound up with the adult world. Thus the speech which leads to her rejection by Juliet is harsh, uncomprehending and completely fair: Go, counsellor! Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain. (III.5.239–40) I do not think, therefore, that we should underestimate the significance of the Nurse’s first speech: it identifies her comically with the family and although her subject matter is Juliet, the use of iambics tacitly relates her to the world of adults, her aristocratic superiors. I shall anticipate to an extent here by noting two further scenes involving the Nurse. The first is when she is taunted by Mercutio in II.4. Her response to his obscene song is: Nurse: An ’a speak anything against me, I’ll take him down, an ’a were lustier than he is, and twenty such Jacks; and if I cannot, I’ll find those that shall. Scurvy knave! I am none of his flirt-gills. I am none of his skains-mates . . . (147–151) which, I think, may cause us to reflect on that first appearance, on how placed she is by the use of the iambic pentameter form and how we are confused by the lexis to misconstrue her placing: i.e. to relate her to Juliet’s world, a world which she can only betray. The prose response here is, I think, explained by the Nurse herself: Now, afore God, I am so vexed that every part about me quivers. (158–9) i.e. it is the form of the immediate unmediated response. However, this observation would appear to need some defending when we consider the following:

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Nurse:

Mistress! What, mistress! Juliet! Fast, I warrant her, she. Why, lamb! Why, lady! Fie, you slug-abed! Why, love, I say! Madam! Sweetheart! Why, bride! What, not a word? You take your pennyworths now. Sleep for a week. For the next night, I warrant, The County Paris hath set up his rest That you shall rest but little. God forgive me! Marry, and amen! How sound is she asleep! I needs must wake her. Madam, madam, madam! Ay, let the County take you in your bed. He’ll fright you up, i’faith. Will it not be? What, dressed, and in your clothes, and down again? I must needs wake you. Lady! lady! lady! Alas, alas! Help, help! My lady’s dead! O weraday that ever I was born! Some aqua vitae, ho! My lord! My lady! (IV.5.1–16)

There can be no doubt that this is a very effective example of prosaic blank verse and it would seem to contradict the explanation of the prose example above. But the point about this speech is that it initiates and sets the tone for a grotesque chorus of lamentations; i.e. from 34 to 65, Capulet, Lady Capulet, the Nurse (again) and Paris indulge in a parodistic confusion of grief. The blank verse here is a hideous simulacrum of intense emotion because, of course, the scene is black comedy. Juliet is not dead – yet; but if she were, we know whom to blame. However, there is a general observation of some importance to put here precisely in the light of this scene. For the outbursts we have just witnessed point up the highly uncertain status of blank verse in this play. I mean that there are significant dramatic moments in the play not in blank verse; so that one is asked to consider the extent to which (a) we are meant to judge other forms from the (critical) base of blank verse or the extent to which (b) more ‘artificial’ forms are there to judge blank verse itself. The more specific point is this: how far is blank verse in the play that form which refuses to permit – excludes – the art of unnecessary linguistic play? Considered then from the perspective of tragic action, to what extent is blank verse expressive of death? And are these two perspectives integrated? Part of my argument is to suggest that this is indeed the case: from Mercutio through to Juliet anticipating her death, or Romeo observing


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her supposed death, blank verse has that degree of artlessness necessary for tragedy. This is, indeed, a complex issue: for example, how does the balcony scene (II.2) possibly fit into my doom-laden definition of blank verse? I shall attempt to answer that question when the sonnet is under analysis. But let me conclude this section by suggesting that Romeo and Juliet anticipates the extended use of blank verse in the great tragedies precisely because – in this play – its connotative potential, its dramatic implications, are thrown into relief by the significant use of other poetic forms. It seems to me that the ascendence (within the play, within Shakespeare’s dramatic development) of blank verse is coincidental with the destruction of ideal (in all its senses) worlds. Shakespearean tragedy destroys art/ifice; circumstances triumph over play.

III

Rhyming Couplets

As preliminary qualifications: I use this term in lieu of ‘heroic couplets’ in order (a) to stress the emergence of rhyme within the schema and (b) to observe that the adjective ‘heroic’ simply does not apply to couplets in this play. If the iambic pentameter is dramatically complex, I think we can say equally that the rhyming couplet is highly ambiguous and that this ambiguity is central to its function in the play’s action. The ambiguity arises because the couplet takes its specific place within the schema as a minor metamorphosis of iambic pentameter blank verse lines. Once paired through the device of end rhymes, blank verse becomes a new form. And yet it is important to stress the point that the couplet inhabits a ‘space’ within the hierarchy in which it is being pulled downwards, towards the base from which it has emerged (or which it has transcended), that is, blank verse, while simultaneously aspiring towards its ideal consummation within the Shakespearean sonnet. The couplet’s coupling is, of course, integral to the very conception of the Shakespearean sonnet. But in Romeo and Juliet, couplets also exist in a variety of indeterminate states, oscillating between the magnetic poles through which the play’s action flashes: that is, on the one hand (a) the world of adulthood and death; thus the couplet as rhymed blank verse, and on the other (b) the world of adolescence, of childhood plus sex; thus the couplet coupling, the consummation of the sonnet. The development of the couplet within the play is indeed complex, particularly in the world of (b); therefore, under the present heading I shall discuss (a) only – the ‘adult’ couplet – and consider (b) in the context of

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the sonnet form itself. Of course this separation is to a degree a matter of intellectual convenience; in the dynamic of dramatic action these two aspects of the couplet are constantly being brought into ironic juxtaposition. This effect can be considered when we ‘re-integrate’ the couplet. The obvious starting point, then, in this first stage of isolating its relevant aspects is with the ‘suspended’ or sententious couplet. Its occurrence in Romeo and Juliet is, on the surface, of no particular interest; thus: Montague:

Black and portentous must this humour prove Unless good counsel may the cause remove (I.1.141–2)

Quite unremarkable, yes: but Baldwin in Small Latine and Lesse Greeke 7 relevantly quotes the following observation: The Sententiae Pueriles was, in all probability, the little manual by the aid of which he first learned to construe Latin, for in one place, at least, he all but literally translates a brief passage, and there are in his plays several adaptations of its sentiments. (vol. I, p. 591) The connexion between the sententiae and the schoolroom is illuminating: the implications of adults imposing upon children the restraints of received wisdom are ironically all too evident in Romeo and Juliet. Thus Friar Laurence to Romeo: Pronounce this sentence then: Women may fall when there’s no strength in men (II.3.75–6) That the form for their expression should – aptly – be the restraint of the rhyming couplet suggests that this apparently straightforward use of rhyme has (perhaps) sinister implications. Consider the following three examples where, I think, Shakespeare’s couplets emerge from the shadows of classroom discipline: Capulet:

But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart. My will to her consent is but a part, And, she agreed, within her scope of choice


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Lies my consent and fair according voice. This night I hold an old accustomed feast, Whereto I have invited many a guest, Such as I love; and you among the store, One more, most welcome, makes my number more. At my poor house look to behold this night Earth-treading stars that make dark heaven light. Such comfort as do lusty young men feel When well-apparelled April on the heel Of limping winter treads, even such delight Among fresh female buds shall you this night Inherit at my house. Hear all; all see; And like her most whose merit most shall be; Which, on more view of many, mine, being one, May stand in number, though in reckoning none. Come, go with me. (To Servant) Go, sirrah, trudge about Through fair Verona; find those persons out Whose names are written there, and to them say, My house and welcome on their pleasure stay. (I.2.16–37, italics mine) Of course, we know how far these sentiments hold their value: at the first instance of open disagreement old Capulet falls to raving: Capulet:

Lady Capulet: Juliet: Capulet:

How, how, how, how, chopped logic? What is this? ‘Proud’ – and ‘I thank you not’ – and ‘I thank you not’– And yet ‘not proud’? Mistress minion you, Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds, But fettle your fine joints ‘gainst Thursday next To go with Paris to Saint Peter’s Church, Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither. Out, you green-sickness carrion! Out, you baggage! You tallow-face! Fie, fie! What, are you mad? Good father, I beseech you on my knees, Hear me with patience but to speak a word. Hang thee, young baggage! Disobedient wretch! I tell thee what – get thee to church a’ Thursday Or never after look me in the face. Speak not, reply not, do not answer me!

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My fingers itch. Wife, we scarce thought us blest That God had lent us but this only child. But now I see this one is one too much, And that we have a curse in having her. Out on her, hilding! (III.5.149–67) The fact that he so damns his daughter (it is at the end of this scene that Juliet severs herself from the adult world of the Nurse and her parents) in blank verse is dramatically neat. The rage of an elderly father against a stubborn daughter anticipates the high tragedy of King Lear: but it equally reminds us of the connotations blank verse carries throughout the play and further causes us to ask ourselves: why the earlier couplets? The answer, I think, lies in the very ambiguity of the form in this play; for old Capulet’s couplets are related both to the sententious utterance and to the consummation of the sonnet. In the latter case, the relationship is ironically established through the subject matter; we are hence deceived into confusing the two worlds, into thinking that the world of adult sententiae can sympathetically guide the world of youthful sexuality. It might be argued at this point that I am putting too much on too little but consider, next, the fact that Shakespeare pursues the question of Juliet’s future in Act I Scene 3, immediately following; thus the Nurse’s blank verse fantasia on her charge’s sexuality leads smoothly into Lady Capulet’s question of marriage and Paris: What say you? Can you love the gentleman? But she is unable to sustain the direct forcefulness of blank verse and breaks out into rhyming couplets: Lady Capulet:

What say you? Can you love the gentleman? This night you shall behold him at our feast. Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face, And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen. Examine every married lineament, And see how one another lends content. And what obscured in this fair volume lies Find written in the margent of his eyes. This precious book of love, this unbound lover, To beautify him only lacks a cover.


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The fish lives in the sea, and ’tis much pride For fair without the fair within to hide. That book in many’s eyes doth share the glory, That in gold clasps locks in the golden story. So shall you share all that he doth possess, By having him making yourself no less. (I.3.80–95) If Capulet’s use of the couplet (in I.2.16–37) is – in retrospect – distressing, Lady Capulet’s is grotesque. One can imagine Shakespeare’s grim pleasure in bringing the couplet’s two worlds into the ironic confusions of these sentences on the ‘art of love’. And the final conceit on ‘the precious book of love’ succinctly reinforces the irony in its anticipation of Juliet’s conclusion to her sonnet exchange with Romeo: Sir, you kiss by the book (I.5.100) Indeed, these congruences reinforce the literary dimensions of the play: its self-consciousness about poetic language and the relationship between written and spoken verse. The final example is the most extended of the couplet scenes: the first encounter between Romeo and Friar Laurence. The whole of II.3’s ninety-four lines are coupled. Why? Obviously, from the perspective of the argument I have proposed, the Friar’s use of the form articulates his role in the dramatic action, presents us with ‘character’. The substance of his opening speech is, of course, ironically related to the play’s poisonous dénouement; in this instance, as he soliloquises, we may be tempted to suggest that the dominant tendency of the form (1–26) is towards the rhyming iambic pentameter, i.e. rhymed blank verse. But to do so could be to ignore the ambiguities which Shakespeare exploits: for in the case of Friar Laurence the rhyming of the iambic pentameter presents us with the couplet as the expression of balance. And this creates linguistically the very dramatic uncertainty we experience in considering the Friar; he is foreover seeking to reconcile, to temper extremities: Enter Friar Laurence alone, with a basket Friar: Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry, I must up-fill this osier cage of ours

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With baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers. The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb. What is her burying grave, that is her womb; And from her womb children of divers kind We sucking on her natural bosom find, Many for many virtues excellent, None but for some, and yet all different. O mickle is the powerful grace that lies In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities. For naught so vile that on the earth doth live But to the earth some special good doth give; Nor aught so good but, strained from that fair use, Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse. Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime’s by action dignified. Within the infant rind of this weak flower Poison hath residence, and medicine power. For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part; Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart. Two such opposèd kings encamp them still In man as well as herbs – grace and rude will. And where the worser is predominant, Full soon the canker death eats up that plant. (II.3.1–20) The ideal of life being comprehended, of opposites reconciled, is at the ironic centre of the tragedy; it is here that Friar Laurence would exist. The drama develops from his attempt to impose balance, control, harmony: Friar:

But come, young waverer, come, go with me. In one respect I’ll thy assistant be. For this alliance may so happy prove To turn your household’s rancour to pure love. (85–8)

The descent into tragedy is inseparable from these ‘sympathetic’ couplets (couplets which appropriately seek to reconcile adults through children) and their transformation back into the blank verse of V.3.229–69, through which Friar Laurence attempts to explain how the symmetry of death came about:


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Romeo, there dead, was husband to that Juliet; And she, there dead, that Romeo’s faithful wife. (231–2) In his failure lies the catastrophe, the destruction of the other world suggested by the couplet, the world of the sonnet.

IV

The Sonnet

The fact of the sonnet is that it reminds us of previous forms – the iambic pentameter and the iambic pentameter couplet – while it introduces us to a simple rhyming variation: the abab quatrain. Of course, while the different parts are transcended in the creation of a new whole, we are nonetheless still conscious of those parts. It seems clear that Shakespeare does this deliberately by balancing ironic anticipations of the sonnet’s magic birth with tragic remembrances of its brief existence. Consider the four following examples, which break down into two plus two. A (i) After the exchange in couplets between Capulet and Paris in I.2.1–37 (discussed above) enter Romeo and Benvolio: Benvolio:

Tut, man, one fire burns out another’s burning. One pain is lessened by another’s anguish. Turn giddy, and be holp by backward turning. One desperate grief cures with another’s languish. Take thou some new infection to thy eye, And the rank poison of the old will die (I.2.45–50)

Spencer in the New Penguin edition describes this as a sonnet’s sestet (p. 180): I would rather call it a quatrain and couplet of the Shakespearean form. ‘Sestet’, after all, implies Petrarchan, which could be misleading. The argument is certainly anti-Petrarchan, suggesting as it does that love can be best cured by infidelity given the inherently faithless nature of man. But these lines have connotations beyond the apparently straightforward pragmatic (or is it cynical?): the concluding couplet seems to be ‘backward turning’ from the world of the sonnet, taking our minds (when we reconsider the whole action) downward into the poisoned world of the sententious iambic couplet, the world which the lovers pathetically attempt to transcend.

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(ii) The second ironic anticipation of the sonnet occurs in the conclusion to the same scene: Romeo:

When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires; And those, who, often drowned, could never die, Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars! One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun. (I.2.87–92)

Here, I think, the effect is broadly ironic through the parody of the most extravagent of Petrarchan ejaculations; the quatrain and couplet are thus suitably sonnet-like. Equally, we know that in the very same Act Romeo will – without hesitation or remorse – negate all of these particular assertions. And, of course, it is nice that when he breaks his vows to the fair Rosaline he does so directly with Juliet’s innocent collaboration in the form of a completed sonnet. B (i) However, if in Act I we are presented with ironic and playful anticipations or intimations of what will shortly (and briefly) be, in Act V (note the balance) that formal development of the sonnet is contrasted by depositing its remains in the graveyard: that is, with Romeo and Juliet. Thus: Paris:

Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew – O Woe! thy canopy is dust and stones – Which with sweet water nightly I will dew; Or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans. The obsequies that I for thee will keep Nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep. (V.3.12–17)

The defeated lover’s crippled sonnet, with its simplicity of diction and syntax, pathetically recalls, through its instance upon weeping, Romeo’s earlier extravagant conceit upon eyes and tears. The juxtaposition is given a grotesque exactness: Romeo kills the besotted Paris and the Petrarchan foolishness of the sonnet is now given its tragic restingplace.


(ii)

Prince:

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A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The sun for sorrow will not show its head. Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things. Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd. For never was a story of more woe Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

This is of course the play’s conclusion; that the laconic summary of the complex tragic action and the threats of retribution are expressed in this form seems (as I have suggested earlier) to be ironically exact. However, that the play ends with a couplet is of further significance; for it is in the context of the sonnet that it should now be reconsidered; in the context – that is – of the adolescent world, the ideal world of innocent experience. Thus the dramatic and formal progress of Act I is to a large extent carried out in couplets. Although we are conscious of the form’s ambiguity, in Romeo’s case it is the unambiguous idea of coupling – physical and spiritual – which is clearly obsessive. Romeo’s couplets – his lovedominated mind keeps breaking out into them as if it were beyond his control to do otherwise – are in search of a sonnet. And so it is that he moves from the easy world of facile paradoxes – Why, then, O brawling love, O loving hate, O anything, of nothing first create! (I.1.176–7) in which love can be A madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet. (I.1.193–4) – to the world of real paradox or rather conflict. That is, the sight of Juliet presents him with the physical counterpart of what has been merely linguistic: Romeo:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear – Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear! So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows

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As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows. The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night. (I.5.44–53) Of course, when Romeo next speaks it is in the sonnet he creates with Juliet. But immediately preceeding the Act’s consummation, is Tybalt’s chilling curse: Patience perforce with wilful choler meeting Makes my flesh tremble in their different greeting. I will withdraw. But this intrusion shall, Now seeming sweet, convert to bitterest gall. (I.5.89–92) These couplets speak of the world of death, the world I have suggested to be of the iambic and, by extension, the rhymed iambic. But, I think, we can also consider these lines to stand in a poisonous relationship to the couplets Romeo has just uttered and to the couplet he is about to create with Juliet. It seems then that, on another level, these lines are a cancerous mutation of the childhood world, the world which is identified with innocent experience, the sonnet world. For these lines are an evil parody of the sonnet couplet: Tybalt’s promise to convert ‘seeming sweet’ (and sweet is, as we shall see, an important word in the sonnet world) into bitterest gall is an inversion of the sonnet couplet’s function, namely to bring together (couple) opposites, to reconcile, to create the preserving sweet which overcomes that choking gall. I shall return to this. Of the Romeo – Juliet sonnet itself, I shall make only two observations: first the lexis articulates the thematic obsession of the Act – coming together; eye to eye, hand to hand, lips to lips in an understanding that fleshliness is now sacred. This coming together is emphasised by the second quatrain’s (see below) repetition of the ‘b’ rhyme; an insistence which is – perhaps – drawing our attention to the rhyming words as a collocation: ‘this kiss’. And thus the ideal of ‘innocent experience’ is exemplified: ‘my sin is purged’. But that belief cannot be sustained in the world of adults. Tybalt’s process of ‘conversion’ overwhelms this sweetness. How much, then, the tragedy is found through that opposition: gall/sweet. The play is concerned at many levels with poison.


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The second observation is concerned with the structure of the sonnet. a Romeo: If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this. b My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand a To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. b Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, c Juliet: Which mannerly devotion shows in this. b For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, c And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss. b e Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. f Juliet: e Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do! They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. f Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake. g Juliet: g Romeo: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. (He kisses her) Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purged. a Then have my lips the sin that they have took. b Juliet: a Romeo: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. (He kisses her) You kiss by th’ book. b Juliet: (I.5.93–110) It breaks down into the following episodes: Quatrain One: Quatrain Two: Quatrain Three:

Romeo Juliet Line One Romeo Line Two Juliet Lines Three and Four Romeo. Couplet Line One: Juliet. Couplet Line Two: Romeo. Romeo starts and finishes, true; but Juliet initiates the couplet with a line which expresses her poise between activity and passivity: she does not move but she grants. Moreover, one should note that Shakespeare does not let the idea rest there. The next four lines, 107 to 110, start another sonnet; i.e. they make up an abab quatrain. Romeo and Juliet are about to start a sonnet cycle of their own.

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Alas! Life, as the Nurse’s intrusion tells us, is not a sonnet sequence: reality destroys that delicate balance the couplet has achieved. And yet, Shakespeare has not done with the form; the complete sonnet is to make one more entrance. It is the fullest statement of what is and what shall not be; of what is about to be lost. Chorus:

Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie, And young affection gapes to be his heir. That fair for which love groaned for and would die, With tender Juliet matched, is now not fair. Now Romeo is beloved and loves again, Alike bewitchèd by the charm of looks. But to his foe supposed he must complain, And she steal love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks. Being held a foe, he may not have access To breathe such vows as lovers use to swear; And she as much in love, her means much less To meet her new belovèd anywhere. But passion lends them power, time means, to meet, Tempering extremities with extreme sweet. (II.1.1–14)

That second Prologue-sonnet takes us forward into the dramatic action which shall destroy the lovers; equally it takes us back to the first Prologue sonnet. It takes us forward obviously to the balcony scene – But passion lends them power, time means, to meet, Tempering extremities with extreme sweet. – and back because, even as we go forwards to the consummation of their love, we cannot forget the doom pronounced by the first sonnet. It is important, I think, to recognise how Shakespeare seized his dramatic chances here. In his source, Arthur Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562), the poem’s ‘Argument’ is put very clearly:8 Love hath inflamed twayne by sodayn sight. And both do graunt the thing that both desyre. They wed in shrift by counsell of a frier. Young Romeus clymes faire Juliets bower by night. Three months he doth enjoy his cheefe delight. By Tybalts rage, provoked into yre,


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He payeth death to Tybalt for his hyre. A banisht man he scapes by secret flight. New marriage is offered to his Wyfe: She drinkes a drinke that seemes to reve her breath. They bury her, that sleping yet hath lyfe. Her husband heares the tydinges of her death. He drinkes his bane. And she with Romeus knyfe, When she awakes, her self (alas) she sleath. This is, of course, a clumsy Petrarchan sonnet. Nevertheless Shakespeare followed his source while transforming it: hence a tragic Prologue in that form ideally expressive of doomed innocent love. But equally, the Petrarchan octave plus sestet failed to satisfy his needs for two reasons: one, it had connotations of an unconsummated frustrated spiritual love and two, it therefore lacked the sexual couplet. Thus the Shakespearean Prologue, thus the un-Petrarchan love couplet in which Romeo and Juliet break through linguistic conventions of repression and actually touch each other. And so as Act II begins we are conscious of tragic irony; the play’s first sonnet has told us From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife. while the whole dramatic experience of Act I has been focused on the consummation of Romeo’s search for a partner, the couplet’s other line. But the potential of that realisation is, of course, destroyed even as we are registering it. As Romeo and Juliet are separated Shakespeare introduces death, reminding us therefore of the first Prologue. Romeo:

Is she a Capulet? O dear account! My life is my foe’s debt. (I.5.117–18)

and then Juliet, again in couplets: My only love, sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!

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Prodigious birth of love it is to me That I must love a loathèd enemy. (I.5.138–41) The form, as much as the tragic fact, makes us recall Tybalt’s curse. The balcony scene in Act II obviously cannot be considered in isolation from the complex effects of these sonnets and their fragments. We cannot now escape the tragic irony of Romeo and Juliet’s second meeting. Although, as Eliot suggests, the verse is perfect as the ‘language of conversation raised to great poetry’9 it is conscious not only of their physical separation, but of its own experience. Language is no longer innocent. Romeo and Juliet seek to purify this consciousness: Juliet:

Romeo (aside): Juliet:

Romeo:

Juliet: Romeo:

Juliet:

O Romeo, Romeo! – wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name. Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this? ’Tis but thy name that is my enemy. Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot Nor arm nor face nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name; And for thy name, which is no part of thee, Take all myself. I take thee at thy word. Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptised. Henceforth I never will be Romeo. What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night, So stumblest on my counsel? By a name I know not how to tell thee who I am. My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, Because it is an enemy to thee. Had I it written, I would tear the word. My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words


Romeo:

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Of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound. Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague? Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike. (II.2.33–61, italics mine)

Thus:

Juliet:

Romeo:

(Enter Juliet above again) Hist! Romeo, hist! O for a falconer’s voice, To lure this tassel-gentle back again! Bondage is hoarse and may not speak aloud, Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine With repetition of ‘My Romeo!’ It is my soul that calls upon my name. How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, Like softest music to attending ears! (II.2.158–66)

In this sense the balcony-scene’s blank verse is simultaneously expressive of love and death: never again can Romeo and Juliet return to the sonnet.10 And so we linger over the couplet which completes the play’s last instance of that form: But passion lends them power, time means, to meet, Tempering extremities with extreme sweet. Love is extreme, yes; but it is just that ‘sweet bait’ on ‘fearful hooks’ (II.1.8) which is the extreme of sweet. Extreme sweet tempers: 1: To bring (anything) to a proper or suitable condition, state or equality, by mingling with something else . . . 2. To modify especially by admixture of some other quality; to reduce to the suitable or desirable degree or condition free from excess in either direction; to moderate, mitigate, assuage, tone down (OED); extremes sweetened. In their love, in their self-tempering, boy/girl, Montague/Capulet, in their coupling, Romeo and Juliet would overcome the extremes of poison. The failure of passion to transcend poison is the tragedy: the destruction of the sonnet couplet is the poetry’s articulation of that fact. In Romeo and Juliet the poetry is dramatic, the drama poetic: form and content perfectly tempered. So that we can point to the verse and say in response to Roy Campbell’s question in his quatrain ‘On Some South African Novelists’ –

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You praise the firm restraint with which they write – I’m with you there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where’s the bloody horse?11 – there. The restraint of form, the curb, is most necessary when the horse is most fiery. The passion of Romeo and Juliet creates their sonnet. Form becomes content.

Notes 1. For a discussion of this aspect of the play, see Robert O. Evans, The Osier Cage: Rhetorical Devices in Romeo and Juliet (University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, 1966). 2. H. A. Mason, Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love (London, 1970). 3. Romeo and Juliet, ed. J. Dover Wilson and G. I. Duthie (Cambridge University Press, 1955; repr. 1974). 4. Romeo and Juliet, ed. T. J. B. Spencer, The New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1967; repr. 1980). All quotations are from this edition of the play. 5. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets – ‘John Milton’, in Johnson (Prose and Poetry), selected by Mona Wilson (London, 1966) p. 841. 6. Ibid. 7. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1944). 8. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. G. Bullough, vol. 1 (London and New York, 1961). 9. T. S. Eliot, ‘Poetry and Drama’, in On Poetry and Poets (London, 1957, p. 88). 10. Cf. A. J. Earl in ‘Romeo and Juliet and the Elizabethan Sonnets’, English, vol. XXVII (Summer/Autumn 1978): ‘The efforts of Romeo and Juliet to live out their love in the only language they know fills the conventional language with a richness that it hardly deserves. Indeed it is through Shakespeare that sonnet language enjoys temporary resuscitation. Ideal sincerity finally exceeds the power of the vocabulary intended to describe it, a vocabulary become moribund in sheer exhaustion. So it is that Shakespeare employs the unpromising resources of, among others, contemporary poets, to create a play of high tragedy. His play deals not only with the death of a pair of lovers, but with the death of a language’ (p. 117). 11. Quoted in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, ed. Philip Larkin (Clarendon Press, 1973; repr. 1974) p. 338.

3 The Community of Interpretation: T. S. Eliot and Josiah Royce*

In September 1913, T. S. Eliot was beginning his final year of graduate courses at Harvard. As is well known, he was undergoing an intellectual trial of considerable rigour at the time. For one thing, he was experiencing the labyrinthine subtleties of Bradleian Idealism. As I have discussed this relationship elsewhere 1 my purpose here is to consider a neglected aspect of this significant moment in the development of Eliot’s mind. For he was now attending Philosophy 20C: ‘A Comparative Study of Various Types of Scientific Method’. This was a seminar under the direction of Josiah Royce. Not only did Eliot prepare two papers for Royce and the seminar, but he also began to work on his doctoral thesis under Royce’s supervision. The point of my essay is thus to consider the importance for Eliot’s intellectual development of this ‘doyen of American philosophers’. That phrase comes, of course, from the Preface to the published version of the thesis, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,2 which Eliot was to complete in 1916.3 Of the two major papers delivered by Eliot, we are fortunate to have a fairly detailed record in the published notebooks of Harry T. Costello. 4 From Costello we can discern in one paper the early form of the discussion about psychological method and the problem of objective attention which was to be expanded into Chapter III of Knowledge and Experience. As a close critical reading of this paper has been given by Richard Wollheim in his essay ‘Eliot and F. H. Bradley’,5 I do not propose to treat of it further. The other paper was not taken up further in the doctoral thesis, and yet Eliot clearly felt it of enough importance to mention it thirteen * Source: First appeared in Comparative Criticism, vol. 5: Biblical and Literary Interpretation, ed. E. S. Shaffer (The Annual Journal of the British Comparative Literature Association, Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 21–46. 81

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years later. In the Introduction to his mother’s dramatic poem Savonarola, under the heading ‘History and Truth’, there is the following reference: The role played by interpretation has often been neglected in the theory of knowledge. Even Kant, devoting a lifetime to the pursuit of categories, fixed only those he believed rightly or wrongly to be permanent, and overlooked or neglected the fact that these are only the more stable of a vast system of categories in perpetual change. Some years ago, in a paper on The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual, I made an humble attempt to show that in many cases no interpretation of a rite could explain its origin. For the meaning of the series of acts is to the performers themselves an interpretation; the same ritual remaining practically unchanged may assume different meanings for different generations of performers; and the rite may have originated before ‘meaning’ meant anything at all . . . The interpretation of history, is only a very much more complex but similar activity . . . 6 The passage is significant in asserting the necessity of interpretative acts; no less important is its recognition of the limits of those acts. Furthermore, Eliot’s return to the essay suggests how convinced he was of the whole tradition within which its argument was rooted. And it is in this context that we should consider his footnote to that passage: ‘The problem of interpretation was of great interest to that extraordinary philosopher Josiah Royce.’7 And thus I wish to pursue the implications of that remark: for Royce’s theory of interpretation is a powerful account of the centrality of hermeneutics. But not only does Royce seek to focus attention upon the necessity of interpretation, he equally challenges the very concept of ‘limits’. The significance of such an interest upon Eliot’s own intellectual development cannot be underestimated, as, in what follows, I shall attempt to show.

I There may be, for us, so great a distance between the environment of Eliot’s birth and childhood, St Louis, Missouri, and that of his public adult career, Harvard, Oxford and London, that any relation between them is strictly fortuitous. The accidents of a private history, of course, may be forced into discourse and given public meaning:

T. S. Eliot and Josiah Royce 83

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god . . . . . . His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard . . . 8 But Four Quartets asks us not to read on the level of purely personal memory. The significance of the river of childhood is only articulated when it is understood historically, publicly. The protean force – ‘the river is within us’ – at once determines natural relations and human actions; and yet these individual feelings and doings are to be understood only if realised within an historical discourse. The same poem describes that dimension: . . . I have said before That the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations . . . 9 And these other currents, which came to characterise human endeavour in the widest sense, are the seemingly oblique directions of thought which become significant when we understand them as the forces of a tradition. It is in this sense that St Louis, on reflection, no longer seems so distant from Harvard or Oxford. Indeed, when we are conscious of a history of thought, it becomes possible for us to regard an individual life as a progression. For it was in the city of Eliot’s birth that the St. Louis Philosophical Society was established in 1866, and the attempts of its founding fathers, W. T. Harris and Henry C. Brockmeyer, were given institutional support. To further the promulgation of German Idealism and the struggle against positivism, the Society published The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the first of its kind in English. American Idealism, in short, took seed in St Louis. 10 In his History of Philosophy, Copleston gives the following account of Harris’s first editorial, in which are set forth the Journal’s speculative purposes: In the first place it should provide a philosophy of religion suitable for a time when traditional dogmas and ecclesiastical authority were losing their hold on men’s minds. In the second place it should develop a social philosophy in accordance with the new demands of the national consciousness, which was turning away from sheer individualism. In the third place it should work out the deeper implications

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of the new ideas in the sciences, in which field Harris maintained the day of simple empiricism was over. 11 There is, of course, no reason to suggest that Eliot’s interest in philosophy should be attributed directly to the idealism of St Louis. The interest lies not in establishing moments of genesis, but in offering a context which will give our account of Eliot’s thought a degree of coherence. If we consider Eliot’s intense interest in philosophy, particularly in Idealism, and his family connections with the city’s educational institutions and the intellectual life of the community, it seems less reasonable to suspect that he was ignorant of this tradition. Indeed it may well have been one of those reasons for the reflection, ‘I am very well satisfied with having been born in St Louis: in fact I think I was fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.’12 The sense of belonging to a community, and having certain moral and intellectual responsibilities to that community were inculcated upon the young Eliot by his family with an earnestness that certainly recalls Brockmeyer and Harris. 13 Perhaps there was a shock of recognition when Eliot first listened to the ‘extraordinary’ Royce; for an examination of his work shows that one could read the course of his philosophical speculation under the three provisions outlined by Copleston above. This, perhaps, is not surprising for two of Royce’s earliest essays were published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.14

II Throughout his career, Royce understood the first two of The Journal’s triad of considerations as aspects of a single problem. The displacement of traditional religious sentiment was creating a moral vacuum in which the individual could survive only by becoming a centre unto himself. A society composed of a plurality of disparate national and cultural groups was, as a result, held together by the determinations of specific economic functions and a superstructure of repressive laws. Such an America was, for Royce, a ‘realm of the self-estranged spirit’15 because consciousness of conduct, self-consciousness, could arise only through the conflict of individual wills within a social structure.16 Social relations therefore had to be constrained through the law. Consequently, in his struggle to assert his individuality, each man must alienate himself from his fellow and from the state. In The Philosophy of Loyalty and Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Questions (both published in


1908), Royce concluded that the innate differences of a pluralistic society could only breed intense conflict and unrest, 17 and thereby articulated most forcefully the central problem of his work: how can a collection of many be made members of one harmonious society? Any resolution was made more complex for Royce by his not only accepting the Idealist premise that all experience is, in one sense, necessarily private, but also (and this is particular to Royce) by his contention that the contents of individual consciousness – their ideas – cannot be separated from the will. It is not surprising therefore that Royce was highly conscious of a fragmented realm of conflicting selves, for the idea which determines the real world had to be understood from a double aspect: on the one hand it has a representational function, an external meaning and, on the other, an internal and primary meaning, the fulfilment of purpose; it is primarily a plan of action, intending an object. 18 Logically, therefore, the fullest expression of an idea is in the articulation of the will, in the completed act. There is no cognition apart from will, and thus the growth of human knowledge must above all be an education of the will.19 To restate the social problem introduced above, Royce, in effect, is asking how it could be possible for a collection of wills, made self-conscious through division, to be brought into concordant relations. How is society, ultimately, to be saved from anarchy? It appeared to Royce that such a resolution lay in the realisation of a social system founded upon the principle of ‘Loyalty’. Loyalty to a cause, to an ideal in and through which men could articulate their individual wills, would bring the plurality into a unity. In the last phase of his career, from 1900 onwards,20 Royce devoted himself to the task of making this abstract principle, this metaphysical ideal, which he formulated in the injunction ‘Be Loyal to Loyalty’,21 less ‘an artificial abstraction’ (The Problem of Christianity, p. 41), as he himself admitted it was, and more demonstrably the foundation of a rationally practical view of the world. In 1913, the year in which Eliot was attending his seminar, Royce published the consummation of this endeavour, The Problem of Christianity. In its Preface, we learn that loyalty is now to be defined as ‘the practically devoted love of an individual for a community’ (p. 41), 22 and then, as if drawing together the first two provisos of the St Louis manifesto, Royce goes on to say: This book, if it is nothing else, is at least one more effort to tell what loyalty is. I also want to put loyalty – this love of the individual for the community – where it actually belongs, not only at the heart of the virtues, not only at the summit of the mountains which the

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human spirit must climb if man is really to be saved, but also (where it equally belongs) at the turning point of human history, – at the point where the Christian ideal was first defined, – and when the Church Universal, – that still invisible Community of all the faithful, that homeland of the human spirit, ‘which eager hearts expect’ was first introduced as a vision, as a hope, as a conscious longing to mankind. (pp. 41–2)23 Indeed, ‘Christianity is, in its essence, the most typical and, so far in human history, the most highly developed religion of loyalty’ (p. 42). Now Royce makes a most important further claim about Christianity in this aspect: the first full statement of the religion of loyalty, the ‘ . . . willing and thorough-going devotion of self to a cause, when the cause is something which unites many selves in one, and which is therefore the interest of a community’ (p. 83), was enunciated in the Pauline Churches, specifically in the Pauline epistles. The reason for this, according to Royce, is because through Paul, the second term in the definition of loyalty – that it is to the community – was first clearly and consciously articulated. Paul first expressed and put into action that ideal community within which disparate wills were brought into harmony: The corporate entity – the Christian community – proves to be, for Paul’s religious consciousness, something more concrete than is the individual fellow man . . . [T]he Apostle had discovered a special instance of one of the most significant of all moral and religious truths, the truth that the community, when unified by an active indwelling purpose, is an entity more concrete and, in fact, less mysterious than is any individual man, and that such a community can love and be loved as a husband and wife love; or a father or mother love. (pp. 93–4) Through the conception of loyalty to the community – specifically to the Church – and thereby to all mankind, Paul transformed the teaching of Christ’s parables from an ideal to a practical resolution of human isolation and distrust. 24 The first part of The Problem of Christianity, ‘The Christian Doctrine of Life’, is thus devoted to an interpretation of the idea of the loyal community in the practical light cast by Pauline instruction. Accordingly, Royce analyses Christianity as a doctrine of social practice, understanding it to be


not merely a religion of [personal] experience and sentiment, but also a religion whose main stress is laid upon the unity and the coherence of the common experience of the faithful, and upon the judgement which a calm and farseeing conscience passes upon the values of life. (p. 230) Mindful of Royce’s emphasis upon the practice of the Christian believer, I now want to consider the second part of the book, ‘The Real World and the Christian Ideal’. Here we find a metaphysical justification of that ideal practice. In short, we must now consider a metaphysical theory of the community.25 All of us, says Royce introducing this discussion, are, it would appear, unthinking pluralists; that is, we seem to hold a commonsense view of the world in which ‘individual human selves are sundered from one another by gaps which, as it would seem, are in some sense impassable’ (p. 236). This common-sense pluralist view is supported by three assertions: first, all immediate experience, all feeling, is necessarily private; second, all thoughts, intentions, and plans, are, unless we wish otherwise, equally inaccessible to the observer; and third, we are individuated by our deeds – ‘The will whereby I choose my own deed, is not my neighbour’s will. My act is my own . . . Deeds and their doers stand in one – one correspondence’ (p. 238). And, of course, following from what we already know of Royce’s voluntarism, the last of these three suppositions – the consciousness of individual actions – is that which he takes to be the basis for doubting any alternative philosophy ‘which appears to make light of the distinctness of the social individuals’ (p. 238). But, on the other hand, there is, indeed there must be, an important aspect of human existence which naive pluralism ignores: namely those activities which constitute the social realm, ‘Language, customs, religion’ (p. 239). And when confronted with an objection based on the observation of such phenomena, what resolution may pluralism then offer? It is interesting that Royce should, at this point, turn to his Harvard colleague, indeed his erstwhile mentor, William James. For James, specifically in ‘The Pluralistic Universe’, had been forced to consider first how pluralism could take account of social, communal, products. And his resolution, his acceptance of a ‘compounding of consciousness’ (p. 241; Royce quoting James) was achieved with the assistance of none other than Henri Bergson. Various selves could hypothetically ‘interpenetrate’ (p. 241; Royce ascribes the term to Bergson) when they transcended rationality, for it was merely the sterile intellect which perforce

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sundered individual minds. Only through intuition can we achieve a state of Oneness. Royce rejects James’s mystical resolution because it rests upon a synchronic consideration of social behaviour. If we take a narrow lateral view of any group, then it may well be that the only way of realising it as a unity would be through some mysterious intuitive ‘co-consciousness’. But this possibility is founded upon a false abstraction. For, [a] crowd, whether it be a dangerous mob, or an amiably joyous gathering at a picnic, is not a community. It has a mind, but no institutions, no organization, no coherent unity, no history, no traditions . . . [A] true community is essentially a product of a time-process. A community has a past and will have a future. Its more or less conscious history, real or ideal, is a part of its very essence. A community requires for its existence a history and is greatly aided in its consciousness by a memory. (p. 243) The social organisation which we call a community, within which many people are in some sense understood to be united, is therefore the product of an historical process, ‘a coherent social evolution’, which is ‘remembered by the community in question’ (p. 242; italics mine) And therefore, Royce argues, because a community is conscious of its past, and in its activity articulates a philosophy of history (as in the case of the Pauline Churches), it is coherent, is one. The psychological unity of many selves in one community is bound up, then, with the consciousness of some lengthy social process which has occurred, or is at least supposed to have occurred. And the wealthier the memory of a community is, and the vaster the historical processes which it regards as belonging to its life, the richer – other things being equal – is its consciousness that it is a community, that its members are somehow made one in and through and with its own life. (pp. 243–4) The distance between Royce and Bergson lies in this very insistence upon the definition of the individual in relation to what might be called an accessible public history. And there is little doubt that an Idealism which insisted upon the necessity of formulating a philosophy of history presented Eliot, as we shall see, with the field of discourse within which his critical and creative writing was to seek articulation. For, as Royce further insists, if Bergson is correct in deeming the self at


any one moment, any particular present, to be a mere fragment, an unreal fleck in the stream of time unless we take into account its past, its memory, he is nevertheless incorrect in not subsuming that personal history within the process of impersonal history. Only through the consciousness of a communal past is the plurality of individual selves brought into a unity which yet does not deny their self-evident differences: the half-truths of pluralism and collectivism are synthesised and transcended. [T]he real or supposed identity of certain interesting features in a past which each one of two men or of many men regards as belonging to his own historically extended former self, is a ground for saying that all these many, although now just as various and as sundered as they are, constitute, with reference to this common past, a community. (p. 247) When, therefore, each individual accepts the same particular past event, acknowledges it as belonging to his own, otherwise private, memory, there is a ‘community of memory’; equally, when each individual accepts and strives for the same expected future event, there is a ‘community of hope’ (p. 248). In short, Royce offers the following definition: ‘ . . . with reference to an ideal common past and future . . . many selves constitute a community’ (p. 252). Now there are three conditions which are necessary for the realisation of the hypothetical community: (1) ‘is the power of an individual self to extend his life, [in] ideal fashion, so as to regard it as including past and future events which lie far away in time, and which he does not now personally remember’ (p. 253). To this first condition we shall give immediate consideration after briefly noticing that (2) ‘ . . . is the fact that there are in the social world a number of distinct selves capable of social communication, and in general, engaged in communication’ (p. 255) and that (3) consists in the fact that the ideally extended past and future selves of the members include at least some events which are for all these selves, identical’ (p. 256). Thus, taking the first condition of the community, Royce goes on to say that the power of ideal extension is without definable limit. Now: This power itself rests upon the principle that however a man may come by his idea of himself, the self is no mere datum, but is in its essence a life which is interpreted, and which interprets itself, and which, apart from some sort of ideal interpretation, is a mere flight of

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ideas, or a meaningless flow of feelings, or a vision that sees nothing, or else a barren abstract conception. (p. 253; italics mine) And Royce devotes the remaining chapters of The Problem of Christianity to an elucidation of the principle of ideal extension or ideal interpretation; for its nature and its limits involve the self in a process equally of individual and historical definition. I must . . . myself personally share [with others] in this task of determining how much of the past and the future shall ideally enter into my life, and shall contribute to the value of that life. (p. 253) Mindful of that last sentence, we must now elucidate Royce’s theory of interpretation.

III ‘A community, as we have seen, depends for its very constitution upon the way in which each of its members interprets himself and his life’ (p. 276). The unity and coherence of each self upon which the community depends devolves upon its interpretation ‘of plans, of memories, of hopes, and of deeds’ (p. 276); and without a unity of individual interpretations there is neither community nor self. What, then, is interpretation, and how is it the principle of unity? Negatively,26 the theory of interpretation which Royce introduces arises from a critique of Bergson, whose dichotomy of reason and intuition he states is a falsification of the cognitive process. 27 Indeed, any dualism which would split knowing into a question of the supremacy of conception or perception is unable to account for the social reality of cognition, which is the active synthesis of the two in human conduct. Moreover, as Royce further argues, Bergsonian intuition is incapable of achieving even that which it claims for itself – the knowledge of the ‘real’ self; for there is no direct intuition or perception of the self, since reflection . . . involves what is, in its essence, an interior conversation, in which one discovers one’s own mind through a process of inference analogous to the very modes of inference which guide us in a social effort to interpret our neighbours’ minds. Such social inference is surely no merely conceptual process. But it cannot be reduced to the sort of perception which Bergson invited you, in his Oxford lectures, to share. Although you are indeed placed in the ‘interior’ of yourself,


you can never so far retire into your own inmost recesses of intuition to find the true self presented to an inner sense. (pp. 285–6)28 Instead of intuition, therefore, Royce introduces interpretation which ‘always involves a relation of three. In the technical phrase, interpretation is a triadic relation’ (p. 286). And thus an interpretation is a relation which not only involves three terms, but brings them into a determinate order. One of the three terms is the interpreter; a second term is the object – the person or the meaning or the text – which is interpreted; the third is the person to whom the interpretation is addressed. (p. 287)29 This process of interpretation is descriptive not only of our relations with manifestations of the other, the not-self, but also with our reflections upon the self. For, as has been previously suggested, in such cases a man interprets himself to himself; that is, the present self interprets its past to the future self. Now Royce extrapolates from this theory of selfknowledge a general metaphysical statement. The relations exemplified by an individual’s act of self-interpretation are precisely analogous to the relations which exist when any past state of the world is, at any present moment, so linked, through a definite historical process, with the coming state of the world, that an intelligent observer who happened to be in possession of the facts could, were he present, interpret to a possible future observer the meaning of the past. (p. 288; italics mine) The important conclusion to that rather prolix sentence draws us to the centre of Eliot’s debate with Royce, and gives us thereby an indication of the question which organises the poetry and prose of the period up to and including The Waste Land: on what principle can we interpret the meaning of the past? For Royce, the triadic theory of interpretation as exemplified through inner reflection is ‘outwardly embodied in the whole world’s history’ (p. 288; italics mine); the past is that realm of events which we now interpret, through the present, to the future. The present thus becomes the interpretation directed to the future which is given of the past, and it is understood to do so ad infinitum.30 It follows, therefore, that the meaning of the present is determined by the interpretation it gives to the past. The importance of such a view, in the light of Eliot’s work,

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cannot, I think, be easily overestimated; for according to Royce, his argument leads us to accept that the relations of the ‘time-process’ are parallel to those of interpretation, and that the ‘time-order . . . is known to us through interpretation’ (p. 293). The meaning of the present is expressed through its historical interpretations of the meaning of the past. History is hence understood as a determinate order in which contradictions and conflicts are understood and harmonised. Now although Royce’s positive historical view, following from his theory of interpretation, will be criticised by Eliot in his seminar paper ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, it will not simply thereafter disappear from his intellectual world. For in its very optimism, its positive assertions, Royce’s theory will help mould this idea of tradition, which is to a great extent a transformation into critical terms of the ideal of the historical community of interpretation. It may thus be worth considering, for example, the following from ‘The Function of Criticism’: There is . . . something outside of the artist to which he owes allegiance, a devotion to which he must surrender and sacrifice himself in order to earn and obtain his unique position. A common inheritance and a common cause unite artists consciously or unconsciously: it must be admitted that the union is mostly unconscious. Between the true artists of any time there is, I believe, an unconscious community. And, as our instincts of tidiness imperatively command us not to leave to the haphazard of unconsciousness what we can attempt to do consciously, we are forced to conclude that what happens unconsciously we could bring about, and form into a purpose, if we made a conscious attempt. The second-rate artist, of course, cannot afford to surrender himself to any common action; for his chief task is the assertion of all the trifling differences which are his distinction: only the man who has so much to give that he can forget himself in his work can afford to collaborate, to exchange, to contribute.31 The interest of this passage lies in its insistence upon making conscious the unstated sense of sharedness, of common cause, of community. Equally, the initial idea of community will contribute to Eliot’s poetic exploration of traditions; but the attempt, in above all ‘Gerontion’ and The Waste Land, to realise it will only emphasise the distance between an ideal and a mocking reality. We can, at least, recognise that Royce has here offered a theory which, by taking up that very ground which Bergson had appropriated


with la durée réelle, displaces him. The Problem of Christianity gives us the first clear indication of the positive ground, the Idealist tradition, within which Eliot was to order his thought. For it is clear that Bergson’s Reality is an impossible fiction, and that what must now be considered is the alternative which Royce puts before us: Reality, so Bergson tells us, – Reality, which must be perceived just as artists perceive its passing data, and thereby teach us to perceive what we never saw before, – Reality is essentially change, flow, movement. In perceptual time, if you abstract from the material limitations which the present bondage of our intellect forces upon us, both present and past interpenetrate, and all is one ever present duration, consisting of endless qualitatively various but coalescing changes. (p. 292) That, in brief, is the world of Prufrock. Any discussion of the interior monologue of ‘Gerontion’ and the floating, unrelated soliloquies of The Waste Land must take place within a critical discourse established by the possibilities of the personal – historical interpretation of the time-process suggested by Royce. The importance of the distinction deserves a lengthy quotation: We learn about [the time-order] through what is, in a sense, the conversation which the present, in the name of the remembered or presupposed past, addresses to the expected future, whenever we are interested in directing our own course of voluntary action, or in taking counsel with one another. Life may be a colloquy, or a prayer; but the life of a reasonable being is never a mere perception; nor a conception; nor a mere sequence of thoughtless deeds; nor yet an active process, however synthetic, wherein interpretation plays no part. Life is essentially, in its ideal, social . . . But when the time-process is viewed as an interpretation of the past to the future by means of our present acts or choice, then the divisions and the successions which are found in the temporal order, are not, as Bergson supposes, due to a false translation of the perceived temporal flow into a spatial order. For every present deed interprets my future; and therefore divides my life into the region of what I have already done, and the region of what I have yet to accomplish. This division is due, not to the geometrical degeneration which Bergson refers to our intellect, but to one of the most significant features

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of the spiritual world, – namely, to the fact that we interpret all past time as irrevocable. So to interpret our past is the very foundation of all deliberate choice. But the irrevocable past changes no more. (pp. 292–3; italics mine) To the thesis that ideas are plans of actions, Royce remains faithful; and in his insistence upon the pragmatist interpretation of thought as a ‘leading’ (James’s word) to practice he is forced to understand the past as a stable foundation upon which the present ideas operate in constructing the future. 32 The past thus takes on an objective status, becoming the datum of all interpretations and circumscribing them. In his desire to escape from Bergson’s fluid irrational process, Royce insists on the definite nature of interpretations based on a secure past of irrevocable deeds which, in turn, were interpretations of the further past. Thus, precisely in what may be considered the most uncertain realm of speculation – the future – we are conscious of a determinate but continuous order: Let one note that every present judgement bearing upon future experience is indeed, as the pragmatists tell us, a practical activity. But let one also see that, for this very reason, every judgement, whose meaning is concrete and practical, so interprets past experience as to counsel a future deed . . . [T]his counsel, if followed, leads to an individual deed, which henceforth irrevocably stands on the score of my life, and can never be removed therefrom. Hence, just as what is done cannot be undone, just so what is truly or falsely counselled by any concrete and practical judgement remains permanently true or false. (p. 293) A judgement about the future based on the interpreted past will be seen, in the end, to be either absolutely true or absolutely false because it counsels us to commit a determinate and individual deed which accomplishes some result. In other words, if the interpretation results in a worthwhile deed, ‘then the interpretation remains as irrevocably true as the good deed remains irrevocably done’ (p. 294). Royce supports this argument from practice with one from theory: In pure mathematics, a deduction, if correct at all, leads to an absolutely correct and irrevocably true discovery of a relation of implication between exactly stated premises and some conclusion. 33


Deduction is simply another form of interpretation in which, yet again, pairs of ideas are mediated and thereby generate new ideas. Such an interpretation may be universally applied to every pair of ideas identical in meaning to that from which the interpretation sprang in the first place. With these two examples, the implications of which shall be examined below, Royce has prepared the ground for the full exposition of the ‘social meaning of the Will to Interpret’ (p. 312) or, as he calls it, bringing the two central ideas of his thesis into conjunction, the Community of Interpretation.

IV The principle of interpretation has hitherto been confined to articulating the individual’s ‘attainment of mastery over life’ (p. 312) – his own life but abstracted from the social context. Yet it is, as we well know, impossible to confine speculation to this mythical individual; we are made in our human relations. And it is in this context that the Will to Interpret must now be placed. Just as I wish to understand my own life as a unity, to see it as from above, so, argues Royce, equally I seek to understand my neighbour, his ‘realm of ideas, of “leadings”, of meanings, of pursuits, of purposes’ (p. 314). The discontentment with the narrowness of self and the estrangement of individuals within a heterogeneous society, indeed the fear of isolation, these are, as we know, the feelings which Royce assumes must drive selves to seek unity with each other. If this absence is transformed into a positive desire, i.e. the will to interpret another self, then and only then can a collection of beings be brought into harmony. For if I could succeed in interpreting you to another man as fully as, in my clearest moments, I interpret one of my ideas to another, my process of interpretation would simply reduce to a conscious comparison of ideas. I should then attain, as I succeed in my interpretation, a luminous vision of your ideas, of my own, and of the ideas of the one to whom I interpret you. This vision would look down, as it were, from above. In the light of it, we, the selves now sundered by the chasms of the social world, should indeed not interpenetrate. (pp. 314–15)34 Bergsonian mysticism is thus finally set aside. The will of the individual, moreover, whose existence demanded our attempt to seek resolution is

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integral to the process of harmony. Each mind, or set of signs, is unique yet part of a whole. Now if the process of interpretation is embarked upon, then the will to be interpreted is necessarily part of the operation; equally, if there is one to whom the interpretation is directed, ‘that other also wills that you should be interpreted to him, and that I should be the interpreter’ (pp. 314–15). Thus, three people technically form the structure, at its most simple level, for a community of interpretation. Furthermore, this community is determinate, for it is structured by the shared consciousness of an ideal goal: simply that of realising through the will to interpret, a community. Through interpretation, therefore, the community is conscious of itself as a community and articulates its spiritual unity. The diverse individual wills are brought into a coherent determinate relationship within the community of interpretation, and the goal of such a community, the ideal unity of insight which gives in ideal ‘complete mutual understanding’ (p. 319) is approximated. One goal realises one community of harmonious wills engaged in the act of interpretation. The description given by Royce up to this point has been concerned with the expression of a social ideal – of a community that transcends strife and conflicting wills. But Royce is not content with presenting a vision; he pushes the argument from interpretation further by demonstrating that judgements can be true only if they are made within a community. Knowledge of the world, statements embodying that knowledge presuppose, in fact, a community of interpretation. And in order to demonstrate his thesis, Royce takes a significant example: the discoveries and methods of their confirmation practised by the natural sciences. I must pause here to observe that Eliot devoted considerable attention to the questions raised by scientific method throughout his life. Thus in the period under discussion now (in effect from 1911 to 1916) he concentrated on the claims of social and human sciences to be considered scientifically rigorous, the central texts at this stage being The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual and Knowledge and Experience (in particular chapter III). Equally, if we turn to The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), we are asked to consider the claims of Sociology in the same terms: i.e., in what way is it science? Of course, in the case of the two later titles Eliot was writing from the experience of the Christian; indeed, chapter II of The Idea of a Christian Society is specifically concerned with defining the term ‘Community of Christians’. And if, in the later works, Eliot is more obviously concerned ultimately with the implications for theology of social sciences and vice versa, the underlying continuity of his intellectual development cannot


be denied. Thus his exposure to the whole Idealist debate over system and interpreting modes of knowledge obviated any fear of the Positivist attack upon poetic language: consider, in contrast, the problems I. A. Richards created for himself in Science and Poetry with the ‘pseudo-statement’.35 Royce’s argument is distinguished from a positivist view by its assertion that in order for scientific discovery to take place, it is necessary for a particular hypothesis to be tested by experience, so that it is verified as a ‘working’ (in the pragmatist sense). But this description is not sufficient to cover the case of what, by definition, is the expression of ‘an idea which has heretofore “worked” for no other man’ (p. 323). We must therefore complete the structure within which knowing can be said to proceed: The individual has made his discovery; but it is a scientific discovery only in case it can become, through further confirmation, the property and the experience of the community of scientific observers. (pp. 323–4) As a consequence of this description we may say that the method of science is a supreme example of the community of interpretation. Indeed, we may further say, according to Royce, that ‘the appeal to the scientific community implies a belief that there is such a community’ (pp. 323–4). The important principle behind any scientific discovery is that of the community which gives it validity; only upon this presupposition can any discovery be said to be true. ‘The existence of this community is presupposed as a basis of every scientific inquiry into natural facts’ (p. 332; italics mine); only when discoveries are taken up, integrated, criticised and tested further within the presupposed community can they be said to be true or false. The goal of this community is the model for all our social intercourse – that of reaching a luminous knowledge which articulates the very existence of the community itself. All scientific research therefore depends upon, in Royce’s words, a ‘loyalty to the cause of the community of interpretation’ (p. 332). But (and here we are led by Royce to the centre of the argument from interpretation) the community is admitted only as a presupposition. How, then, can we know that any community of interpretation exists outside the particular ideal model embodied by the scientific discoverer and his colleagues? The resolution to this question lies, in fact, within the very act of doubting itself. For, on Royce’s terms, to question the reality of the community is simply to ask whether there is a real world: We all of us believe that there is any real world at all, simply because we find ourselves in a situation in which, because of the fragmentary

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and dissatisfying conflicts, antitheses, and the problems of our present ideas, an interpretation of this situation is needed, but it is not now known to us. By the ‘real world’ we simply mean ‘the true interpretation’ of this our problematic situation. (p. 337) No other reason can be given than this for believing that there is any real world at all. If we call into doubt the reality of an appearance, seeking to resolve an antithesis, to harmonise conflicting ideas, or contradictory experiences, then we have perforce accepted the need for interpretation or mediation. In our dissatisfaction we posit the possibility of a resolution. That resolution or interpretation is the real world. 36 But, as we know from the discussion of science, an interpretation can only be real, can only be granted existence, if it functions within a real community. The reality of the world thus depends upon its interpretation which in turn depends upon the community. The real is accordingly expressed through the community of the infinite series of interpretations which resolve contradictions and simultaneously generate, within time, new interpretations. And so Royce concludes that the community of interpretation, as articulated in its most coherent form in the natural sciences, structures and conditions all knowing. Yet this conclusion offers but a model aspect of our knowledge of the real world. For if we extend the area of interpretation, realising all the while that there is not and never can be a real world outside of the interpreting community, we must conclude that a world-view is in essence the harmonious inclusion of all the particular sequences of human interpretations. That is, for Royce there is an Absolute; it is the Universal Community of Interpretation within which the series of interpretations identifies the ‘whole order of time’. In the concrete, then, the universe is a community of interpretation whose life comprises and unifies all the social varieties and all the social communities which, for any reason, we know to be real in the empirical world which our social sciences study. The history of the universe, the whole order of time, is the history and the order and the expression of this Universal Community. (pp. 340–1) 37 Human society and human society alone (‘Time, for instance, expresses a system of essentially social relations’, p. 344) or to be more exact, the community of men is the Universe’s Interpreter. ‘To the world, then, belongs an interpreter of its life’ (p. 342).


The metaphysical doctrine here arrived at is the extension of what Royce believed to be the very principle upon which knowledge is founded: the interpreting community. I want to consider, in conclusion, two aspects of this principle. The first of these is simply that of the historical nature of Royce’s thesis. We may recall from the earlier general discussion of the community that it can be a unity in so far as it extends consciously into the past. The theory of interpretation, in its more technical aspect, makes this a necessity of the process of knowing, precisely because it is a process. Royce returns again and again in the second half of The Problem of Christianity to emphasise what he considers to be the essentially historical character of interpretation. The present interprets the past to the future. At each moment of time the results of the whole world’s history up to that moment are, so to speak, summed up and passed over to the future for its new deeds of creation and interpretation. (p. 344)38 And he adds, significantly, that ‘the system of metaphysics which is needed to define the constitution of this world of interpretation must be the generalized theory of an ideal society’ (p. 344). That remark confirms the relationship between the preliminary description of community and the fully realised theory of the cognitive process. We shall return to it in a moment. The acts, thoughts, discoveries, in their totality, the human experiences, are in this sense historical: In the order of real time the events of the world are signs. They are followed by interpreters, or by acts of interpretation which our own experience constantly exemplifies. For we live, as selves, by interpreting the events, the meaning of our experience. History consists of such interpretations. These acts of interpretation are, in their turn, expressed, in the order of time, by new signs. The sequence of these signs and interpretations constitutes the history of the universe. (pp. 345–6) And finally, more generally, from the above: For a fact of experience, as you actually view that fact, is first an event belonging to an order of time, – an event preceded by an infinite series of facts whose meaning it summarizes, and leading to an infinite

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series of coming events, into whose meaning it is yet to enter. (p. 347; italics mine) The events of the world are the course of history only in so far as they are interpreted. In effect, they are signs, objects or expressions of minds that demand and ‘determine . . . an interpretation’ (p. 354).39 In other words, ‘the Universe consist[s] of real signs and their interpretations’ (p. 354) and in this infinite process consists its very being, mediating the past and the future through the interpretative present. I wish first to emphasise this historical aspect of Royce’s theory of interpretation, because an idea of fact or event or experience is thereby defined as simultaneously stable and yet open to change. Every sign must be taken into the sequence and equally ensures the process of interpretation; and if it is interpreted, then it becomes part of the community, i.e., is real. The second aspect of the community of interpretation now leads us to consider this: what can we say about past religion? For we may recall in the argument given above that Royce considers his metaphysical considerations about the substance of the real world to be generalisations about ‘ideal societies’ (p. 347). Now, on reflection, we can immediately point back to his treatment of the scientific community and see that here indeed is an ideal and actual society of interpretation. No more need be said about it here. But, in the concluding chapters of his book, Royce turns the discussion back to that subject which had initiated and then dominated the first part, namely, the essence of Christianity. And here we discover the other example, indeed, the absolute example of the ideal community of interpretation in the Christian, or more explicitly, the Pauline Church. The relation of this community to the metaphysical principle I have outlined above and to the direct social experience which is the animating force behind Royce’s work, is clearly enunciated in the following passage. The threads of argument are woven into a single, significant nexus – locating precisely that initial human quality, the will, which Royce had sought to rationalise throughout his life: Our Doctrine of Signs extends to the whole world the same fundamental principle. The World is the Community. The world contains its own interpreter. Its processes are infinite in their temporal varieties. But their interpreter, the spirit of this universal community, – never absorbing varieties or permitting them to blend, – compares and, through a real life, interprets them all.


The attitude of will which this principle expresses . . . [is that which] . . . first expresses itself by saying ‘Alone I am lost, and am worse than nothing. I need a counsellor, I need my community. Interpret me. Let me join in this interpretation. Let there be the community. This alone is life. This alone is salvation. This alone is real.’ This is at once an attitude of the will and an assertion whose denial refutes itself. For if there is no interpreter, there is no interpretation. And if there is no interpretation, there is no world whatever. In its daily form as the principle of our social common sense this attitude of the will inspires whatever is reasonable about our worldly business and our scientific inquiry. For all such business and inquiry are in and for the community, or else are vanity. In its highest form this attitude of the will was one which Paul knew as Charity, and as the life in and through the spirit of the Community. Such, then, is the relation of the Christian will to the real world. (p. 362) In each man’s wilful loyalty to the Church is found the belief in and respect for the other, that is, for the reality of other human wills. Within an acknowledged structure of interpretation human deeds, human practice, can be harmoniously and fruitfully unified so that the individual is created, is made substantial. The ideal of the Universal Community of Interpretation cannot be dismissed as nugatory – it exemplifies the very nature of the real, of our possible action in relation to a real human world. In this articulated sense of community lies the essence of Christianity. Now, if we recall the preliminary discussion of community we will remember that the community depended first upon the power of the individual to ideally extend his past and future life beyond the limits of his own direct experience, so we may say that the essence of Christianity, because it is to be found in the idea of community, is in this sense historical. Indeed, so far as a believing Christian will be seeking to make his life coherent, to direct his ideal plan of action at a moment of crisis, he will perforce need to call upon and interpret this wider past of his community. And for Royce this means calling to mind the spirit of the early Christian Churches to which Paul was converted. For it was here that the first expression of the essence of Christian doctrine – the ideal community – was articulated. And at this point, accepting the idea of community, we reach the crucial significance, the ‘novelty’ (p. 368), of Royce’s discussion of Christianity. For if the essence of Christianity is its historical consciousness – its articulation of a community of

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remembrance – to what does it point back? If to a text, say the Pauline Epistles, is it not to a discredited set of promises, of unfulfilled prophecies? For, as Royce points out: ‘The end has never come. The Lord has not returned. The saints have not triumphed’ (p. 373). Indeed we may now see that ‘every dearest hope of the early Church concerning the near deliverance of the suffering world was a delusion; and that certain of the apostle Paul’s most burning and seemingly inspired words were a statement of literally and historically false predictions’ (p. 373; italics mine). Therefore, to be a modern Christian it is necessary to devise a new way of seeing, an historical consciousness which shall in fact create an awareness of the distinction between ‘symbol and truth, between figure and literally accurate statement, between parable and interpretation’ (p. 374). The essence of Christianity will only be revealed within a new historical discourse, an interpretation which affirms, rather than contradicts, the reality of its doctrine. Those elements of the Gospel – ‘the cross, the death, the resurrection, the appearance of the risen Lord to the brethren’ (p. 374) – those which were historical facts to the early Pauline Christians, how far can they be held to have stood beyond the ravages of time, true and unchangeable and adequate? The affirmative nature of the discourse of interpretation, in fact, lies precisely in its obvious historical recognition that ‘Paul’s whole picture of nature is remote from ours’ (p. 375). Such a recognition conditions taking up the role of interpreter and, in thereby seeking to demonstrate the living relevance of the principle of interpretation, embodying the central Pauline thesis of the ‘Beloved Community’ (p. 380). So that what becomes necessary is not the Historical Truth of the Gospel, but the history of the community; the latter, the living historical enterprise, engages in setting forth truths of interpretation which will articulate a common understanding. It is possible therefore that those truths relative to the present will rest upon doubting what may have been taken as past historical truths. But as always with Royce, doubt is the foundation of certainty. If the man whose consciousness of the present so jars with the accepted past that he can believe in nothing other than the necessity of the spirit of reconciliation, of interpretation, he nevertheless has the essence of the Christian community; he will ‘remain true to what, as a fact, was the very heart of all the hearts of the faithful, both in the Pauline Churches and in all the subsequent ages of Christian development’ (p. 377): The one condition of such holding fast by the deepest spirit of all the Christian ages is, I repeat, that he should be able to say: The redeeming divine spirit that saves man dwells in the Church . . . His problem


of Christianity is now simply the problem whether he can say this today. His problem for the future is the problem whether he can continue to say this. And now comes the extraordinary conclusion of Royce’s relativistic idealism; the passage goes on: If, in order to be able to say this, he has to learn now, or in the future, to view as symbol, as legend, as myth, any accepted narrative that you may mention concerning the person of Christ, he will be in genuine touch both with the perfectly historical Christianity of Paul, and with the deepest meaning of the whole of Christian history, so long as he [is] able to say, The divine spirit dwells in the Church, and thereby redeems mankind. (p. 377; italics mine) It is the spirit of the Church, of the community of the reconciling interpretations, and not the flesh of Christ, which is the historical essence of the religion of Loyalty. But, we may ask, what Church? And Royce replies first, in the negative, ‘neither the official church nor the enthusiast’s sect’ (p. 378) if it would centre ‘all its interests in an effort to perfect its picture of the human personality of the founder’ (p. 378), and second, in the positive: whatever errors have still to be abandoned, and whatever symbols have to be translated into new speech, the true Church is represented on earth by whatever body of men are most faithful, according to their lights, to the cause of the unity of all mankind. (p. 379) If we act ‘according to [our] lights’ then there is no doubt for Royce that we are true to the divine presence of the spirit in the Church, ‘whatever be [our] view as to the literal correctness of the reports of the coming judgement, and whatever [we come] to hold, as to the correctness of this or that account of the person of Christ’ (pp. 379–80). We have in the resolution offered in The Problem of Christianity an attempt to transform the rationalistic criticism of religion, which reached its apotheosis in the last years of the nineteenth century, into the triumphant reconciliation of reason and faith. For Royce not only makes community the presupposition of religious sentiment – the universal brotherhood – but asserts it to be the very structure of our historical world and its rationalistic achievements: in short, science, methodical reasoning at its most sceptical yet creative, is not only not hostile to religion,

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or more precisely to Pauline religion, but is perhaps complementary, a microcosm of the great paradigm – the Universal Community: our theory of the World of Interpretation, and our doctrine that the whole process of the temporal order is the progressive expression of a single spiritual meaning, is – not indeed proved – but lighted up, when we consider for a moment the question: ‘What manner of natural world is this in which the actual successes of our inductive sciences are possible?’ (p. 389) The extent to which Royce considered his ‘interpretation’ of this traditional conflict to be the justification of his works cannot be underestimated. For he had released religion from that dilemma it had been pitched into by the forces of nineteenth-century ‘higher criticism’. I refer, of course, to the controversy of the historical Jesus: its seeds lay in Hegel and its flower emerged with the works of D. F. Strauss in the Life of Christ and F. C. Baur in Epochs of Church History. With the assertion that Jesus was but a man and mortal was not the whole of Christianity in jeopardy? Royce, in beginning his penultimate chapter – ‘The Historical and the Essential’ – had quoted the orthodox objection to the young Hegelians: ‘The truth is that the very idea of religion as consisting in personal fellowship with God, has faded from Strauss’s mind, and with its disappearance went also in large measure the power to sympathize with, or appreciate, essential Christian piety as it existed from the first . . . ’ ‘In general, it may be concluded that Hegelianism tended to commit a grave offence against history by construing Christianity as a system of ideas which is intelligible and effective apart from Jesus Christ.’ (p. 365) Royce, it seems, had shown, to the contrary, that Strauss and Baur had committed no such offence; indeed, he had suggested the true historical method – that of constant reinterpretation of the past to the future. I mention this relation between Royce and his German antecedents because as Basil Willey suggests, the work of Strauss was a turning point in nineteenth-century religious thought, ‘a noble, a palmary effort of the nineteenth-century mind, and it shares with other great achievements of that century this quality: that it can still challenge us, and compel us, in the name of honesty and self-respect, to declare in what way we think we have improved upon it, outgrown it, or transcended its standpoint’.40


In the very first paragraph of this paper, I suggested that my intention was to be concerned ‘historically’ with a significant moment in T. S. Eliot’s intellectual development. And so it is: I think any reader of Eliot’s work will recognise in Royce an aspect of the ideal’s articulation – the transformation of doubt – which is the horizon of Eliot’s poetry and prose. It is a horizon towards which he was forever travelling. Equally, it is the value of a consciousness like Eliot’s that it is alert to the permanent dimensions of human change. It is no accident of this account that just as Royce should recognise the significance of the higher criticism and debate with his Harvard graduates over the implications of ‘interpretation’, F. H. Bradley, the major subject of one graduate’s further thoughts in a work deemed by Royce to be that of an ‘expert’, 41 should have had this to say, in 1874, about the full implications of the Tübingen Hegelians, not only for the essence of Christianity but also for the very principles by which are determined its historical claims to truth. In the preface of ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’ he wrote: If we meddle in any way with the history of certain times, we must touch the element or a part of the element in which hitherto the Christian principle has brought itself home to the religious consciousness. And to a person who identifies the element with that which exists in it, or who believes that the truth of a principle is to be found at the beginning of its temporal development, such modification will doubtless appear an all-important matter. That it is important I do not question. I know that it is so. But I know this also, that the extent and generally the nature of the influence, which a modification of history must exercise on religious belief, is a subject on which it is remarkably easy to come to a conclusion, and extremely hard to come to a right one.42 It may not be, as Bradley says, his ‘business to express an opinion on the relative truth and falsehood of existing religious beliefs’; 43 but, as he acknowledged in the passage quoted above, the modification of history based upon the principles of higher criticism implied a serious qualification of religious belief. These observations are, I assume, of relevance in understanding how we change ourselves; as Frank Kermode reminds us in The Genesis of Secrecy: Gallie observes that following a story is ‘a teleologically guided form of attention’. And as many others have argued, to make arrangements for such guidance is to have some ulterior motive, whether it

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is aesthetic, epistemological, or ethical (which includes ‘ideological’). These are Morton White’s categories of metahistorical control or motive, others have more complex schemes. According to William James, ‘the preferences of sentient creatures are what create the importance of topics’, and Nietzsche, in ‘The Use and Abuse of History’, declared that ‘for a fact to exist we must first introduce meaning’. All this we know, even if we behave as if we did not. The historical narrative comes to us heavily censored (as the account of a dream is censored) but also heavily interpreted (as that same account is affected by the dogmatic presuppositions of the analyst, which are, as Habermas says, ‘translated into the narrative interpretation’.) The historian cannot write, nor can we read, without prejudice. I hope we have seen that this is true of the gospel narratives.44 Equally, the considerations I have raised in this paper are animated by a belief in the community of Language. I mean that it is uninteresting to think of poetic language as primarily an expression of deviance or eccentricity. It is a multiplicity of forms through which we make interpretations cohere; in the examples we insist upon re-reading we express above all our struggle against death. We interpret our lives thus: We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness. I have said before That the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations – (‘The Dry Salvages’, II)

Notes 1. P. Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909–22 (Brighton, 1982), pp. 143–74. 2. T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (London, 1964), p. 10. There are brief studies of Royce’s influence upon Eliot in: A. C. Bolgan, ‘The Philosophy of F. H. Bradley and the Mind and Art of T. S. Eliot: An Introduction’, in English Literature and British Philosophy: A Collection of Essays, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (Chicago and London, 1971); H. Howarth, Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot (London, 1965), pp. 209–14; E. Thompson, T. S. Eliot: The Metaphysical Perspective (Carbondale, Ill., 1963),


3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

pp. 14–16. Thompson interprets the poems written up to 1911 in relation to Royce. This, I think, is a mistake. K. Smidt, Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot (London, 1961), pp. 15–17. Knowledge and Experience, p. 9. Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913–1914: as recorded in the notebooks of Harry T. Costello, ed. Grover Smith (Brunswick, New Jersey, 1963). Grover Smith claims that all traces of Eliot’s paper have disappeared, but in fact the entire MS of the paper given on 9 December 1913 is in the John Hayward Bequest of T. S. Eliot material in King’s College Library, Cambridge. I have discussed the paper at length in ch. 4 of T. S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development. ‘Eliot and F. H. Bradley’, in On Art and the Mind: Lectures and Essays (London, 1973). Charlotte Eliot, Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem (London, 1936), p. viii. This passage is referred to in Josiah Royce’s Seminar, p. 73. Savonarola, p. viii. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London, 1962), p. 205. Ibid., p. 208. J. H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London, 1931), pp. 317–23, gives an account of the establishment of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy and the St Louis Hegelian movement. Frederick Copleston, SJ, A History of Philosophy (London, 1966), VIII, p. 266. For different perspectives on the St Louis movement see: Woodbridge Riley, American Thought: From Puritanism to Pragmatism and Beyond (Gloucester, Mass., 1915; repr. 1959), ch. VII, ‘The German Influence’. He stresses the importance of the aesthetic interest of the group. H. G. Townshend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States (place of publication unstated, 1934), ch. VII: ‘Philosophy in St Louis’. Howarth, Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot draws attention to the St Louis Hegelians (pp. 55–63). See Eliot, ‘American Literature and the American Language’, in To Criticize the Critic (London, 1965), p. 45. Ibid., p. 44, where Eliot recollects that he was brought up under the rule of the ‘Law of Public Service’ which ‘operated especially in three areas: the Church, the City, and the University’. See the Bibliography (by I. K. Skrupskelis) of Royce’s works in The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce (2 vols), edited with an introduction by J. J. McDermott (Chicago and London, 1969), II, 1174–5. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York, 1908), p. 245. See John E. Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York, 1963), pp. 111–12. See H. W. Schneider, A History of American Philosophy (New York, 1957), p. 262. See Copleston, A History of Philosophy, VIII, 271–2. See Townshend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States, p. 116 and Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy, pp. 82–3. For details see J. E. Smith’s Introduction to Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (1913; Chicago and London, 1968), p. 2 (further references to this edition will be given in the text). Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, p. 183. See also ibid., p. 83. For the dating of the publication of The Problem of Christianity see Richard Hocking’s introductory essay on Royce in Royce’s

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23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

Stalin on Linguistics and other Essays Seminar, p. xviii: ‘ . . . Volume II of The Problem of Christianity . . . appeared in print earlier in the very year in which Professor Costello began his notebooks.’ Thus Eliot could have been aware of Royce’s arguments before he started the year’s seminar. Note that while on the one hand Royce claims that his work on the metaphysics of Christianity is not directly influenced by Hegel (p. 39), on the other, he sees the thought of his friend C. S. Peirce, whose logical discoveries form the basis of the theory of interpretation, as being in harmony with Hegel (p. 303). Thus ibid., p. 95, where Royce states that ‘Christian love, as Paul conceives it, takes on the form of Loyalty.’ Hence Royce embarks upon a restatement of the problem of the One and the Many which introduced our discussion of his work. See The Problem of Christianity, p. 225. Positively from the influence of C. S. Peirce (see note 23 above). Royce quotes from Bergson’s lecture as follows: ‘If our powers of external and internal perception were unlimited, we should never make use of our power to conceive, or of our power to reason. To conceive is a makeshift in the cases where one cannot perceive; and one reasons only in so far as one needs to fill gaps in our outer or inner perception, or to extend the range of perception’ (The Problem of Christianity, p. 277). Two pages later, Royce suggests his own attitude to such a philosophy: ‘Only the more uncompromising of the mystics still seek for knowledge in a silent land of absolute intuition where the intellect finally lays down its conceptual tools . . . ’. Royce attributes this criticism to Peirce. For critical analysis and interpretation of Royce’s theory see: M. B. Mahowald, An Idealistic Pragmatism (The Hague, 1972), p. 126; J. E. Smith, Royce’s Social Infinite (Archon Books, 1969), p. 74. ‘ . . . [W]e can define the present as, potentially, the interpretation of the past to the future’ (The Problem of Christianity, p. 289). Eliot, ‘The Function of Criticism’ in Selected Essays (London 1932; third enlarged edition 1951, reprinted 1965), p. 24, italics mine. See Smith, Royce’s Social Infinite, ‘Past time . . . is constituted by a realm of events the traces of which are present in historical records’ (p. 84). See, on the question of deduction yielding novel conclusions, Smith, Royce’s Social Infinite, p. 103. See Smith, Royce’s Social Infinite: ‘ . . . Royce maintained that the will to be self-possessed, to be guided by genuine insight independent of whim or fancy, is fundamental’ (p. 103). Clearly, Royce’s argument presupposes that human beings must seek order; of course it would be hard to think of a more fundamental assumption for thought about human beings in the first place. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (1926, 1935), reissued with commentary, as Poetries and Sciences (London, 1970), pp. 57–66. Royce adds the following covering aside on unremitting scepticism: ‘If you say that perhaps there is no solution of the problem, that hypothesis, if true, could only be verified by an experience that in itself would constitute a full insight into a meaning of the real contrast, and so would in fact furnish a solution’ (p. 339).

T. S. Eliot and Josiah Royce 109 37. The Absolute is so defined on p. 350. 38. See also p. 361: ‘The same principle (of interpretation) applied to our memories and to our expectations, gives us our view of the world of time, with all its infinite wealth of successive acts of interpretation.’ 39. The theory of signs, Royce states, comes from C. S. Peirce. 40. Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies (London, 1949), p. 220. 41. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience, p. 10. 42. F. H. Bradley, ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’ (1874), in Collected Essays, 2 vols (Oxford, 1935), 1, 3. 43. Ibid. 44. F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1979), p. 118.

4 Hong Kong, Shanghai, the Great Wall: Bernard Shaw in China*

Hong Kong Shaw’s descent upon Hong Kong on Saturday, 11 February 1933, was given extensive coverage by the local press. A small insecure territory ruled by a group holding the values of the British middle-class (‘attitudes to the Chinese were close to middle-class attitudes to servants in Britain’)1 offered a multitude of chances to be terrible. The visit got off to a good start with Shaw refusing to speak to the Rotarians: he reasoned it thus to reporters who interviewed him on board the Empress of Britain: ‘I remember the beginning of Rotary. . . . It was a movement to induce captains of industry to take their business more scientifically and to raise business men to the professional rank.’ But now, ‘Rotary Clubs are merely luncheon clubs, which as a general rule know as much about the aims and objects of Rotary as a luncheon of Church of England members knows about the 39 Articles . . . .’2 The Rotarians’ Vice-President, P. S. Cassidy, attempted to respond to this snub in what he presumably took to be the Shavian spirit: ‘I am sure it is his loss.’ Unfortunately, his comrades lost their nerve and at the Shawless meeting of 14 February, the hapless Cassidy retracted his comment: ‘In case a reflection is cast on the Rotary Club as a whole I would like to make it quite clear that no criticism was intended. The remark was meant to be humorous. . . . I am a great admirer of Mr Shaw and have benefitted intellectually from reading his works.’3 Alas, poor Cassidy.

* Source: First appeared in Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, vol. 5: Shaw Abroad, ed. Rodelle Weintraub (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), pp. 211–38. 110

Bernard Shaw in China

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Shaw’s brief stay in Hong Kong seemed, at first, doomed to arouse only the most facetious and trivial of controversies. Not that Shaw himself was avoiding the seriousness of the East. His journey into China would be taking him towards the first struggle, in effect, of the Second World War – the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, of which he had this to say: Japan is going to take Manchuria. . . . But hasn’t she behaved very correctly over it all? She pledged herself to the League of Nations that she would not declare war on anyone. Consequently she has not declared war on China, but has contented herself with fighting – all so legitimately. What does China expect the League to do? An economic boycott? But the League has funked the issues. And now it is gradually ceasing to exist. Japan has smashed the League, or, let me put it this way, Japan has called the League’s bluff. And he was able to add the observation that through disarmament [the Great] Powers want to come to some arrangement by which they can fight more cheaply. They hold meetings and say to each other ‘if you disarm, we’ll disarm,’ and the result is deadlock. The greatest satisfaction to us is that in the next war we will be knocked by a ten inch shell and not a sixteen inch shell.4 Although the newspaper’s subheading to this interview was ‘Satire is the keynote’, there was really no threat – pace the Rotarians – to home and hearth. But he was not done yet. Imagine the sheer folly of not exploiting Shavimania while the Hong Kong press were spanieling at his heels. Consider: reports were coming through of excited students at Sun Yatsen University in Canton desperate to see him and of enlisted men in Hong Kong being read to from the Preface to The Apple Cart. Editorials greeted him as the greatest man ever to visit the place. Photographs immortalised him clowning on the deck of the Empress of Britain as a sea-dog gazing out toward some mythical horizon. Reporters reported everything they could scrounge up. They told of his eccentric clothes, his funny hat, his white beard, his ‘twinkling eye’. And when tired of his appearance, they told of his opinions, however satirical. And when tired of his appearances and opinions, they told of his movements. Thus: In the afternoon [of Saturday, 11 February] a party on a ramble organized by the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Home, in Wanchai, having visited

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several old landmarks of the Colony in the Pokfulam neighbourhood, had the pleasure of seeing one of the world’s landmarks, Mr Shaw, who was returning from a drive round the island under the guidance of Professor R. K. Simpson of Hong Kong University.5 And what could be more appropriate than an afternoon spin with the Professor of English? Perhaps it was completely innocent but one would like to believe – with hindsight – that the academic (who was to be succeeded, after the war, by Edmund Blunden) and the playwright were whispering conspiracy as they pottered through Pokfulam. Yet events unfolded decorously enough: on Monday, 13 February, Shaw, accompanied again by Professor Simpson, took ‘tiffin’ at the residence of Sir Robert Ho Tung – perhaps Hong Kong’s most intriguing resident and certainly one of its university’s greatest benefactors. Widely known as the ‘Grand Old Man’, Ho Tung – who was six years Shaw’s junior – had risen dramatically from poverty to become, via the Maritime Customs in Canton, the Manager of the Chinese Department of Jardine, Matheson and Company, erstwhile purveyors of opiates, now mightiest of hongs. As Woo Sing Lim in The Prominent Chinese in Hong Kong (1938) observed – somewhat laconically, perhaps – ‘Sir Robert soon multiplied the business returns and connexions of the firm.’ Indeed, by the age of thirty Ho Tung was a millionaire and associated with every important business enterprise in the Colony. When he resigned his compradoreship in 1900 (at the early age of 38) Sir Robert Ho Tung was already known as the leading expert and merchant in Hongkong in property, insurance, shipping, and [the] import and export business, with agencies in Java and the Philippines. From 1900 and onwards one company after another invited him to serve on its Board of Directors, until to-day he is a Director of 18 of the leading companies in Hongkong and Shanghai as well as being Chairman and largest shareholder of a number of them. 6 The meeting in Hong Kong certainly seemed to grip Shaw’s imagination. Above all, the Eurasian millionaire of obscure origins and astounding ascent had a very sharp self-image. ‘Sir Robert adopted the manners, deportment, and costume of a Chinese gentleman and did not seek to pass as a European nor to enter European society. “Sir Robert,” a contemporary wrote, “takes a keen interest in all matters relating to Chinese life.”’7


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That ‘Chineseness’ appealed to Shaw. The interior of the Ho Tung residence, ‘Idlewild’, made a significant impression: he was to use the private temple as a setting for Act III of Buoyant Billions and to recall it elsewhere in an article on ‘Aesthetic Science’ in 1946: When I was in Hong Kong, I was entertained very agreeably indeed by Sir Robert Ho Tung. We were both of the age at which one likes a rest after lunch. He took me upstairs into what in England would have been a drawing room. It was a radiant miniature temple with an altar of Chinese vermilion and gold, and cushioned divan seats round the walls for the worshippers. Everything was in such perfect Chinese taste that to sit there and look was a quiet delight. A robed priest and his acolyte stole in and went through a service. When it was over I told Sir Robert that I had found it extraordinarily soothing and happy though I had not understood a word of it. ‘Neither have I,’ he said, ‘but it soothes me too.’ It was part of the art of life for Chinaman and Irishman alike, and was purely esthetic. But it was also hygenic: there was an unexplored region of biologic science at the back of it. 8 Although Ho Tung had several residences in Hong Kong – as well as houses in Macao, Shanghai and London – and although the Hong Kong houses were literally above those of almost all his fellow Chinese, ‘Idlewild’ was clearly something special. Irene Cheng, Ho Tung’s daughter, describes its physical and spiritual significance: ‘Idlewild’ was a large, well-known house, with an excellent view of the harbor and with gardens on several levels linked to each other by flights of steps and pathways, two cement tennis courts (which were used as a nursery for plants instead of for tennis), and a large vegetable patch on the highest level. Several of the older Ho Tung children were born in ‘Idlewild.’ Many happy events occurred there . . . when Father celebrated his sixtieth, seventieth, and ninetieth birthdays. In 1920 he commemorated his Silver Wedding Anniversary with Mamma and in 1931 his Golden Wedding Anniversary with Mother. . . . ‘Idlewild,’ sadly, was also the scene of several funerals, including Father’s in 1956 . . . .9 And so Shaw was indeed being honored. Yet if they agreed on spiritual health, there was surely some intellectual distance between them on the international body politic and its

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well-being. Ho Tung was a committed supporter of Chiang Kaishek. And Chiang Kaishek and the Kuomintang (Nationalists) were committed, in turn, to the suppression of – above all – Communism. So one wonders, therefore, what Sir Robert made of his guest’s performance down the hill that afternoon at the university to which he had given so much support. On Tuesday, 14 February, the South China Morning Post reported as follows: BRILLIANT ADDRESS GEORGE BERNARD SHAW BREAKS RESOLUTION ADVISES UNIVERSITY STUDENTS TO BE COMMUNISTS EDUCATION DENOUNCED It is one thing to ignore the Rotarians; it is quite another to urge a group of young Chinese to become radicals. The university, after all, was a focus of colonial contradictions: a ‘British University on Chinese soil’.10 Here is the version of that paradox in the words of its founder and first chancellor, Sir Edward Lugard: It is open to all races and creeds, and its matriculation and degree examinations will be maintained at a standard equal to that of English Universities. Its medium of instruction will be English so that those who graduate may be able to read for themselves the works in English dealing with the subjects they take up, and British influence in the Far East may be extended.11 It could hardly help to spread that influence if very famous people like Shaw advised students to become Communists. Nor should one underestimate the important position universities had gained in Chinese societies: the uprising of 4 May 1919, in China, against ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, was inspired and led by university students in Beijing. The consequences of this protest were profound; the May 4th Movement ‘had an incalculable effect on education, on labor organizations, on the attitudes of intellectuals toward their country and toward themselves’.12 Indeed, the founder of the Chinese Republic, Dr Sun Yatsen, ‘had tried out his wings in an attempted armed occupation of Canton in 1895, only three years after graduating from the University of Hong Kong’s own forerunner, the Hong Kong College of Medicine for the Chinese, a hotbed of young revolutionaries’.13


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That afternoon, the Great Hall of the University was packed with students and distinguished guests; but before Shaw could rouse the young he had to negotiate another round of grovelling from the Rotarians. Clearly tenacity and ubiquity were essential to their nature. The South China Morning Post reported it with a degree of malicious pleasure: When Mr Shaw was accompanied to the dais by the Vice-Chancellor, Sir William Hornell, there was a terrific out-burst of cheering. Sir William introduced Mr Shaw collectively and then individually to the vistors. The pair stopped before the Press representatives. ‘I have met them already,’ commented G.B.S. ‘And this is Mr M. F. Key, formerly of the Press,’ said Sir William. ‘Yes,’ said Mr Key, ‘But now secretary of the Rotary Club. I want to tell you, Mr Shaw, that you were quite right in all you said about the Rotary Club the other day.’ Sir William interjected, ‘But Mr Shaw said that the Hongkong Rotary Club was probably an exception.’ ‘I had to be polite’ was the dry comment of the famous man. Thus warmed up for the task ahead, Shaw set about his audience with enthusiasm: ‘I am here as a guest of the University. I have a very strong opinion that every University on the face of the earth should be levelled to the ground and its foundations sowed with salt.’ Further: There are really two dangerous classes in the world – the half-educated, who half-destroyed the world, and the wholly-educated who have very nearly completely destroyed the world. When I was young – an incalculable number of years ago – nobody knew anything about the old, old civilizations. We knew a little about Greece and Rome and we knew that Rome somehow or other collapsed and was very ably replaced by ourselves. But we had no idea how many civilizations exactly like our own had existed. They almost all collapsed through education. And the response to this demagoguery? ‘Laughter.’ Or a little later – banter: ‘What are you going to do? I don’t know. You may say “Shall I leave the University and go on the streets?” Well, I don’t know. There is something to be got from the University. You get a certain training in communal life which is very advantageous. If I had a son I should

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send him to the University and say “Be careful not to let them put an artificial mind into you. As regards the books they want you to read, don’t read them.” (Applause) Professor Brown: ‘They never do.’ (Laughter) Shaw: ‘Well, that’s very encouraging.’ This was the spirit of the assembly: laughter, applause, cheerful backtalk. ‘We like it’ one student shouted out when Shaw asked if he should continue. So where was the Communist menace? If you read, read real books and steep yourself in revolutionary books. Go up to your neck in Communism, because if you are not a red revolutionist at 20, you will be at 50 a most impossible fossil. If you are a red revolutionist at 20, you have some chance of being up-to-date at 40. So I can only say, go ahead in the direction I have indicated. And although the exhortation immediately following this assertion – always argue with your teacher – was again greeted with laughter, one wonders what these students really thought about Shaw’s political advice. In China, the Kuomintang and a host of warlords were shooting and beheading, among other things, Communists. Whatever the individual’s response to this argument, the mass greeted Shaw’s peroration with ‘Prolonged applause’: The thing you have to remember is valuation. Remember all you have to forget or you will go mad. Keep and stick to your valuation. You may be wrong but you must make up your mind. Being human and fallible you may come to wrong opinions. But it is still more disastrous not to have opinions at all. I hope you are properly edified and will not regret having made me break my promise not to make a speech while in Hongkong.14 One imagines that the audience was indeed edified – in several ways. First, there was the metaphysical defiance of the man: Shaw rampant, time couchant. In a sense what he said mattered less than the fact of being able to say it – still. Hence the second and related aspect of the performance: its theatricality. The students were clearly overwhelmed by the brio, the iconoclastic gaiety, the reckless comedy of it all, the sense of liberation from the solemnity of institutionalised thought. The burden of two cultures, two sets of tradition, two languages of instruction and correction, can be felt even today. And thus we come to the third


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aspect of that speech: how far can we see a real political gesture in it? How much trouble did Shaw wish to stir up among these students? Certainly he was firm about colonies; in the Preface to John Bull’s Other Island, he had written of ‘the truth formulated by William Morris that “no man is good enough to be another man’s master”’ (BH 2, 870).* But that is not necessarily a preliminary for the advocacy of Communism. Here we can turn to another Preface, that of On the Rocks, written immediately after his return to Britain. I went round the world lately preaching that if Russia were thrust back from Communism into competitive Capitalism, and China developed into a predatory Capitalist State, either independently or as part of a Japanese Asiatic hegemony, all the western States would have to quintuple their armies and lie awake at nights in continual dread of hostile aeroplanes, the obvious moral being that whether we choose Communism for ourselves or not, it is our clear interest, even from the point of view of our crudest and oldest militarist diplomacy, to do everything in our power to sustain Communism in Russia and extend it in China, where at present provinces containing at the least of many conflicting estimates eighteen millions of people, have adopted it. (BH 6, 607) Of course, this is a familiar Shavian rhetorical ploy: induce consternation amongst the opposition by turning its world upside down; what you fear most you should actually fear least. International Communism will keep the world safe for international Capitalism. It is an interesting argument and one that can be pondered today. Was Shaw right? Does the world paradoxically need two apparently conflicting – hostile, even – systems in order to remain balanced and stable? Certainly, one world war and two atomic bombs later, great nations are having to consider the implications of a Capitalist Japan and a Communist China. But to what extent are we now peering into an unholy nest of contradictions? On the one hand, here is Shaw, having lunched with one of Hong Kong’s great entrepreneurs, sallying forth to incite Chinese students (who were directly benefiting from Sir Robert’s financial skills) to overthrow the shackles of Colonialist Capitalism. On the other hand, there is the puzzle as to how he thought the students were actually to benefit from this advice: according to the argument of the Preface to On the Rocks, a Communist China would be of advantage to Britain and its * BH, The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw, 7 vols (London, 1970–4).

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Capitalists. What then was Shaw’s position in the whole reckless adventure? Consider again the Preface to On the Rocks and its concluding remarks: Now I was not physically prevented from saying this, nor from writing and printing it. But in a western world suffering badly from Marxphobia, and frantically making itself worse like a shrew in a bad temper, I could not get a single newspaper to take up my point or report my utterance. When I say anything silly, or am reported as saying anything reactionary, it runs like wildfire through the Press of the whole world. When I say anything that could break the carefully inculcated popular faith in Capitalism the silence is so profound as to be almost audible. I do not complain, because I do not share the professorial illusion that there is any more freedom for disillusionists in the British Empire and the United States of North America than in Italy, Germany, and Russia. I have seen too many newspapers suppressed and editors swept away, not only in Ireland and India but in London in my time, to be taken in by Tennyson’s notion that we live in a land where a man can say the thing he will. There is no such country. (BH 6, 607–8) But this – surely? – is manifestly untrue. It was indeed the Western press within the Empire that was lavishing attention upon his most provocatively anti-Capitalist utterances. ‘When I say anything that could break the carefully inculcated popular faith in Capitalism the silence is so profound as to be almost audible’ – to have written those words demands some explanation. Was Shaw’s memory impaired? It would seem not; had he not complete recall about Sir Robert Ho Tung’s domestic temple? Perhaps then we should argue from the other extreme. He knew exactly what he was saying in his revision of the narrative: he was speaking as playwright/manager of the comic’s past performance. In that case, it is necessary, above all, to keep the house open, not to let the theatre of the self ‘go dark’. Thus what may matter is the understanding that a speech once made – a performance – needs to be kept alive within the series of further performances it can generate. Contrary to Shaw’s own account then, there was an immediate response to reports of his speech: the front page of The Hong Kong Telegraph carried, in its first column, the following letter: Sir – Allow me to congratulate the Vice-Chancellor of the Hongkong University on his enterprise in securing the attendance of Mr Shaw


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at a tea-party held there yesterday afternoon. Sir William Hornell’s [the Vice-Chancellor] distinguished supporters are also to be thanked, many of whom will no doubt treasure the newspaper account of the affair. Mr Shaw’s student listeners had the treat of their lives. They, really, quite understood that the famous author was but talking with his tongue in his cheek. The Chinese have such a keen sense of humour! Seriously, I trust that all concerned in yesterday’s farce now see their mistake. I can appreciate the misgivings of those responsible if a lesser light of theirs had raved half so rantingly in a lecture-room of our University. We can also realise how difficult it will be for those in authority to deal with any mild outbreak of ‘Bolshevism’ which may occur at our principal seat of learning. After the wise counsel given yesterday, I can, in addition, appreciate the confusion in the minds of students when next they hear that one [of] their countrymen has been gaoled for preaching ‘revolution’ in our streets. Yours etc. . . . 15 Fair enough: what indeed if the students had taken to the streets or stormed the library chanting Bolshevik slogans? Had not authority already compromised itself? And had not Dr Sun Yatsen, founder of the Chinese Republic, stated, just ten years earlier at the same University, as he addressed the Students’ Union, that ‘I got my revolutionary ideas in Hong Kong?’16 Whatever the outcome of the speech, Shaw had pitched his audience (both Chinese and European) back into history, into thinking about the world that was grinding itself into very small pieces indeed. The correspondence that followed suggests as much. There was, true, a leader from the South China Morning Post which put up a fair imitation of judicious, even-handed assessment, to begin with. On the one hand: Reactions to Mr G. B. Shaw’s visit are mixed. His ardent admirers stand staunchly by him and dilate upon the brilliance of his utterances, while the mischievous chuckle to see the pained expressions on the faces of the eminently proper. Outrageous! The average person, perhaps, has been surfeited and, not a few disappointed, having in their dullness expected something far better from the oracle. In fairness, it must be said, however, that no criticism attaches to Mr Shaw. He was on holiday and with no desire to speak or to be interviewed.

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On the other: Having been pestered [by Professor Simpson? by Sir Robert Ho Tung? by the Vice-Chancellor?], he responded naturally and with Shavian malice aforethought, setting himself out to be deliberately outrageous, by way of reprisal and as though to teach us that stinging plants and insects are best left alone. The editor can only abuse Shaw since, as he somewhat testily concedes, despite being the kind of venomous toad he is, the man cannot actually be ‘blamed’ for the débâcle: Exception has been taken to his remarks to the University students, and it is being said that no explaining may remove all of the harm that may have been done thereby. Nevertheless the position remains that upon his hosts falls the responsibility of justifying Mr Shaw’s irresponsibility. Himself would offer no apology: and his disciples deny that his satires can have been misunderstood, or, in any event, that any harm can come from candour. The discussion thus ends in impasse or else is ruled out as unnecessary and the episode to be forgotten. It is a pity the editor couldn’t have stiffened his sinews for a crusade and demanded, for example, a naming of names, since the piece tails rather sadly away, as if – suddenly – the world of Hong Kong was seen as forever on the outside of somewhere really important: There is only one Shaw, and that he should grace Hongkong but once in his lifetime is an historical event, to be appreciated in all humility. In comparison, what matters? If in fact the Shavianism has been overdone, having acquitted Shaw of blame it can only be pleaded that seldom does a fish worth baiting come this way. . . . As we are, Shaw has come and Shaw has gone; and so back into our narrow beds creep and let no more be said.17 It is a relief to discover, therefore, that some of the journal’s readers were made of sterner stuff. ‘Graduate’, for example: Actually Shaw himself is an example of the tragedy of a mind undisciplined by a University education. Nobody can deny his genius; everybody is made to laugh by his humour; but on reflection anyone might also weep that such a genius has done so little, if any,


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constructive work. . . . Few people in Britain take Shaw’s social or political views seriously and it is unfortunate that any of the British in Hong Kong should have done so . . . . And P. H. Larkin: You have absolutely spoilt him! You have credited him with a power greater than the Creator! You have placed him on a pedestal so high that he fears to fall, lest his fall would be disastrous; hence his attempt to justify his omnipotence by clinging fast to the top, daring not to look down on the ground from his dizzy height! And what do we, mere men in the street, get from this man-made god? Trash! Absolutely undiluted trash! Shaw is first and last an egoist, and the way he babbled about the affairs of the world as if he knew all, escaping nothing, plainly shows this self-patting of him. For the love of Mike give us less of Shaw and more of the saner men!18 And so on. Except that the point was being missed. These critics wrote as if they were back in the genteel suburbanity of London’s Metroland; but Shaw had made his gesture with great calculation: ignore the Europeans, speak to the Chinese. That allowed him to delight and offend simultaneously. And it raised a nagging doubt for the European mind: what would the Chinese make of this provocation? Could they – unlike the British in Hong Kong – take him seriously? And this, as ‘Pro and Anti-Shavian’ observed, is what really mattered: In the welter of correspondence on G.B.S.’s famous lecture, it appears to me that most of your correspondents, Shavian and anti-Shavian alike, ignore the main point. I mean the effect that such an open support of Communism will have on the lower social strata of our Colony. I know nothing of the student body of the University, but am willing to take it as read, that they will be able to place such advice in its proper perspective. I take it that representatives of the Chinese press were in attendance at the lecture, and I would like to know how it appeared in their papers, and what the average Chinese would make of it. 19 Indeed: what was the reaction of the Chinese press? In the first instance – none. The Hong Kong Government Secretariat for Chinese Affairs was not enthusiastic about Shaw ‘preaching’ to the natives. And so the Chinese papers were discouraged from meeting him on the day

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of his arrival. As a result, there was the following exchange, quoted in the Shanghai North China Herald: Mr. Shaw greeted the correspondents with the words: ‘You do not look very much like Chinese’ and expressed surprise at the entire lack of Chinese pressmen. ‘Where are the Chinese,’ he asked with his usual genial impertinence. ‘Are they so primitive that they have not heard of me?’20 What seems a gratuitously offensive remark made a point, then, about government by ignorance. On the other hand, the South China Morning Post heard Shaw somewhat differently: On Saturday there were only six reporters present when G.B.S. strolled in. We watched him anxiously, but our fears were groundless. G.B.S. was at peace with the world. ‘Hullo, only six of you? Where’s the rest?’ were his first remarks. Someone explained that all the Hongkong newspapers were represented. 21 Well, all the English language papers, that is. Thus Shaw’s remarks in the Preface to On the Rocks turned out to be half-true. A silence was imposed where it mattered. The Colonial Government was reacting to Shaw with, no doubt, the student uprisings in China of 4 May 1919, the Hong Kong seaman’s strike of 1922, and the General Strike in Canton of 1925 – the subject of Malraux’s first China novel, Les Conquérants (1928) – on their minds. The unions and radicals had shown their potential in that last uprising; Hong Kong had been severely affected: A boycott of British goods and a general strike were immediately declared [in response to the machine-gunning by British and French troops of fifty-two demonstrators in Canton]. Hong Kong, fortress of British imperialism in China, was laid prostrate. Not a wheel turned. Not a bale of cargo moved. Not a ship left anchorage. More than 100,000 Hong Kong workers took the unprecedented action of evacuating the city and moving en masse to Canton. 22 The times in China had been and still were interesting. Thus tight censorship over the local Chinese press’s reporting of Shaw’s speech to


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the University was deemed mandatory. The day after he spoke, it appears that no Hong Kong Chinese newspaper reported his Communist exhortations; yet ironically enough, Shanghai itself was aware of these events. A large number of the bigger papers’ Hong Kong correspondents were there and telegraphed the text of the speech back to their editors. 23 Indeed, for one of the Chinese language papers there – Shen Bao – Shaw composed ‘A Message to the Chinese People’, the last words of which offered the following advice: Europe can give no counsel to Asia except at the risk of the rebuff ‘Physician, heal thyself.’ I am afraid I have like-wise nothing to say in the present emergency except ‘China, help thyself.’ With China’s people united who could resist her? 24 But how could the Chinese people unite themselves? The crisis into which this most ancient of civilisations was being dragged would not be resolved with the (far from simple) defeat of the Japanese. The whole history of China involved, in 1933, not just the contradictions of the European and Japanese occupations, but also the internal conflicts of the Chinese themselves – the sum of which Trotsky called ‘historical backwardness’. Not just colonialism, then, nor the exploitation of the urban proletariat was sufficient to explain the tragedy of China. Above all it was necessary to get at the very roots of a profoundly degrading poverty. Trotsky again offers the analysis: In agrarian relations backwardness finds its most organic and cruel expression. . . . Half-way agrarian reforms are absorbed by semi-serf relations, and these are inescapably reproduced in the soil of poverty and oppression. Agrarian barbarism always goes hand in hand with the absence of roads, with the isolation of provinces, with ‘medieval’ particularism, and absence of national consciousness. The purging of social relations of the remnants of ancient and the encrustations of modern feudalism is the most important task . . . .25 As the Empress of Britain pulled out of Hong Kong harbour on 15 February, one eager commentator, aware of the events which had just taken place, was already committing his thoughts to print in Shanghai. ‘In Praise of Bernard Shaw’ appeared in Shen Bao, two days later, under the signature He Jiaqin. This was just one of the numerous pseudonyms used by China’s greatest analyst and ironic narrator of its appalling ‘historical backwardness’ – Lu Xun, itself an alias. Here is the piece,

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hitherto untranslated into English. Let it serve to introduce the man Shaw was to meet, on 17 February, in Shanghai. ‘In Praise of Shaw’ Before Shaw came to China, the newspaper Dawanbao expressed the hope that the Japanese military activities in the north would be suspended because of his visit, and it called Shaw ‘the peace-making old man.’ After Shaw arrived in Hong Kong, the press translated the Reuters dispatch on Shaw’s address to the youths of Hong Kong, and titled it Communist Propaganda. Shaw told the Reuters reporter that the latter didn’t look Chinese, and that he was surprised at the fact that not a single Chinese journalist had come to interview him. He asked, ‘Are they so ignorant that they don’t even know who I am?’ On the contrary, we are all very sophisticated and well-informed. We know all about the benevolence of the Hong Kong Governor, the regulations of the Shanghai Ministry of Administration, the latest news about which celebrity is a relative of which, and who has now become an enemy of whom. We even know which day of the year happens to be the birthday of whose wife, and what her favourite dish is. But as for Shaw, well, alas, all we gather of him is the three or four translations of his works. Therefore, we cannot know of his thoughts before and after the war, nor can we understand profoundly the way he thinks after his visit to the Soviet Union. But still, his greatness can be seen from his very words of address to the students in the University of Hong Kong, as reported by Reuters on the 14th: ‘If you don’t become a red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you will become a hopeless fossil when you’re fifty. If you try to become a red revolutionary when you’re twenty, then you may have the chance of not falling behind the times when you get to forty.’ What I meant by greatness does not lie in his urging our people to become red revolutionaries. For, our country does have ‘special national conditions’ – you don’t have to be red, just become a revolutionary and you will lose your life tomorrow, without the chance of ever reaching forty. What I meant by greatness lies in the fact that he had even thought about the day when our youths of twenty turn forty or fifty, while not losing sight of the present either. The rich can take their money into foreign banks, take planes to leave the land of China, or lament that Politics is like the whirling


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wind, and the people hunted like wild deer. The poor can’t even afford to think about tomorrow – they are not allowed to and neither do they dare to anyway. So how can we talk about twenty or thirty years from now? What Shaw said was nothing unusual, but it is an evident sign of his greatness nevertheless. That is why this man is called Bernard Shaw. 26 These contradictions were to haunt Lu Xun after his encounter with their master in Shanghai. The metropolis was a bizarre and grotesque cosmopolitan point d’appui for all kinds of barbarism. In Shanghai, Japanese, Colonialists, War Lords, Nationalists and Communists were converging for the end. Their bitter struggle was, in effect, the logical conclusion to the nightmare of China’s history. Lu Xun saw it clearly enough: Our vaunted Chinese civilization is only a feast of human flesh prepared for the rich and mighty. And China is only the kitchen where these feasts are prepared. . . . Because the hierarchy handed down since ancient times had estranged men from each other they cannot feel each other’s pain; and because each can hope to enslave and eat other men, he forgets that he may be enslaved and eaten himself. Thus since the dawn of civilization countless feasts – large and small – of human flesh have been spread, and those at these feasts eat others and are eaten themselves; but the anguished cries of the weak, to say nothing of the women and children, are drowned in the senseless clamour of the murderers. 27

Shanghai In Shanghai there was little to suggest the millennium. And yet a kind of fantasy also seemed to be true to the city’s animus. Or rather fantasy was one way in which the realities of history could be ‘translated’. Christopher Isherwood’s prose account of 1938 suggests exactly how far the European world of Shanghai then challenged reality: You can buy an electric razor, or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel, and gossip with Freddy Kaufmann, its charming manager, about the European aristocracy or pre-Hitler Berlin. You can attend

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race-meetings, baseball games, football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath-houses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult to obtain in this climate, but there is enough whisky and gin to float a fleet of battleships. The jeweller and the antique-dealer await your orders, and their charges will make you imagine yourself back on Fifth Avenue or in Bond Street. Finally, if you ever repent, there are churches and chapels of all denominations.28 And then there was the ‘real’ world, the world which offered little hope of escape – la condition humaine: Within the International Settlement, the two extremes of the human condition almost touched each other. Here were the mansions and the banks, the elegant shops, the luxury restaurants and the nightclub at the top of a tower, from which guests had watched the Japanese attack on the outer city, a few months earlier. And here were the refugee camps and the dozens of factories in which children were being literally worked to death by their employers. The refugees were packed into huts with triple tiers of shelves; one shelf for each family to cook, eat and sleep on. The perimeter of the Settlement was guarded by a mixed force of foreign troops, confronting the Japanese troops who guarded their conquered territory of deserted ruins. . . . Misery in Shanghai seemed more miserable than elsewhere, because its victims were trapped between their western or Chinese exploiters and their Japanese conquerors, without any apparent hope of escape.29 That nightmare was remorselessly enveloping Shanghai when Shaw arrived. In one sense, then, the famous man’s day-trip to such a world (the number of foreigners in Shanghai – 50,000 – equalled the number of dead babies left on the streets in any one year in the 1930s) becomes an ‘historical’ moment which almost refuses to let itself be taken imaginatively: a Dante is needed to guide our spirits through this Inferno. Nevertheless, Shaw – a diabolical enough spirit – did indeed have an extraordinary gift for creating significant moments; a kind of moving negative capability. Thus in Shanghai, on 17 February 1933, he, the cynosure, created a conversation piece: in the attention focused upon Shaw, a moment in China, in this disastrous decade, was distilled. History


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is process, yes, but we return in this ‘photographic world’ to the ideal (perhaps fallacious) of the frozen frame; the ‘images’ in time are the ‘images’ of a time. Certain photographs were taken. A useful initial focus on these ‘images’ is found in Harold Isaacs’s Introduction to Straw Sandals: Chinese Short Stories 1918–33 (with a foreword by Lu Xun). Apart from eventually completing the classic account of Stalin’s betrayal of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution (with a foreword by Trotsky), Isaacs also published highly critical accounts of the Kuomintang Shanghai terror in the China Weekly Review, of which he was the founding editor. Furthermore, in his Introduction to Straw Sandals, Isaacs recalls not only the violence directed against writers and intellectuals in the thirties, but also the courage of those ‘visible important Chinese’30 who opposed it. In particular, three people stood out. First, Lu Xun, whose ‘prestige as China’s foremost writer protected him from arrest, if not suppression of his work and repeated anonymous threats against his life’.31 A second figure was Cai Yuanpei, a man ‘beyond reach of any ordinary attack’32 because he had shown great moral courage during the May 4th period in 1919 when, as Chancellor of Beijing National University, he had supported the students in their demands for freedom of expression. Now he was active in the League for Civil Rights (of which he was a co-founder), the organisation which was acting as Shaw’s host in Shanghai. The third major figure Isaacs mentions is Soong Chingling, widow of Dr Sun Yatsen – founder of the Republic – sister of Madame Chiang Kaishek and T. V. Soong, Chiang’s Financial Advisor. Repudiating her family, this formidable woman – Madame Sun – had moved to a radically critical attitude towards Kuomintang policies. As Cai Yuanpei’s co-founder of the League for Civil Rights, she was prepared to speak directly about the state of affairs: The Shanghai International Settlement, which the imperialists describe as an ‘Island of security and justice,’ is also a paradise for imperialist enemies, traitors and betrayers of the Chinese people, opium traffickers and gangsters. Indeed, the foreign settlements are the headquarters for the auctioning off of China, and one of the chief bases of activities against the Chinese people and the existence of the Chinese nation. In this city now come and go, in absolute freedom and with official recognition and honor, representatives of Japanese imperialism that has invaded, conquered and annexed four of our provinces. Here representatives of the Chiang Kaishek

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Government and of the invaders of our territory, make official and friendly calls to prepare for the secret treaty that will turn our territory and millions of our people over to a foreign imperialist conqueror. While this goes on, members and leaders of the Chinese revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ movement who are struggling against the dismemberment and subjection of China, suffer imprisonment, torture, death and a living death in mediaeval prisons. These iniquitous conditions must be brought to an end by the united, determined struggle of the broad masses of the Chinese people. They can be terminated forever only when we take our fate in our own hands, free the country from imperialists, and establish our own courts and other institutions of a free people.33 It was at this woman’s house (in the aptly named Rue Molière) that Shaw was the guest of honour for lunch. Also present were Lu Xun, Cai Yuanpei, Harold Isaacs (in a manner of speaking) and three figures who are new to the narrative: Agnes Smedley, Lin Yutang and Yang Xingfo. Yang Xingfo will take up an enigmatic role in this lunch – the image of which offers us an ironic example of our historical interpreted world – while in their separate ways Isaacs and Lin Yutang force us to recognise the truth of F. H. Bradley’s observation that history stands not only for that which has been, but also for that which is; not only for the past in fact, but also for the present in record; and it implies in itself the union of these two elements: it implies, on the one hand, that what once lived in its own right lives now only as the object of knowledge, and on the other hand that the knowledge which now is [,] possesses no title to existence save in right of that object, and, though itself present, yet draws its entire reality from the perished past.34 Lin Yutang’s presence should seem clear enough. The soon-to-becelebrated explicator of things Chinese in My Country and My People (1935) was Shanghai’s leading belle lettrist and literary editor (his journal Lun Yu [Analects], was to publish a ‘Special Issue on Bernard Shaw’ in March 1933) and yet, as we shall literally see, despite his written testimony about the lunch, he was to suffer a most bizarre obliteration as an object of historical knowledge. Likewise Harold Isaacs. Agnes Smedley, on the other hand, seemed to create an inviolable historical presence with her life. An élan vital (if ever such a thing were to exist) seemed to possess her soul. In their introduction to a selection


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of her reportage from this period, Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution, Jan and Steven MacKinnon give us a brief life: She exposed prison conditions in the United States; worked to establish birth control clinics in Germany, India and China; raised funds and helped organize the Indian revolutionary movement against the British; defended Chinese writers against persecution by Chiang Kaishek; became a war correspondent of international stature; raised funds for Chinese war relief; nursed wounded guerillas of the Chinese Red Army; and at the end of her life fought McCarthyism in the United States. 35 Smedley had come to Shanghai via Germany (the Frankfurter Zeitung had serialised her autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth in 1928–9) and, not surprisingly, the worst of what she found in China appalled her. In Chinese Destinies (1933), China’s Red Army Marches (1934) and Battle Hymn of China (1943), she reported the struggle of China to escape from its medieval nightmare. Equally, as the titles suggest, her sympathies were manifest – she was unreservedly pro-Communist; her last major work (published posthumously), The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (1956), emphasised the extent of that commitment. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to confuse that conviction with fanaticism, with a Yeatsian ‘excess of love’. If her work suggests an obsession with death, with cruelty and degradation, that is so because it was true of the place and the time. There is, however, her equal insistence upon the extraordinary intensity of Chinese life; its potential for delight, for pleasure. In her intellectual sympathies, she was able to extend respect to Lin Yutang while not only being an admirer of Lu Xun (who did not hold Lin Yutang in high regard) but also a translator of his work (as he was of hers) and a co-editor. In her own writing, she sought to resolve the apparent conflict between journalism and fiction, ‘to write with the factual truth of journalism and yet produce writing that will live beyond its first appearance’.36 She looked for artful truth. There is, however, one further fact to note about this remarkable woman. In 1949, Smedley was accused by the United States Army of having been part of a Soviet spy ring in Shanghai. She went to court and forced the accusations to be retracted; nevertheless Chapman Pincher, in Their Trade is Treachery, asserts that there is ‘no doubt that she was a dedicated agent of the Comintern, promoting world revolution, and was deeply involved with several Soviet spy rings in Shanghai which, at that time, was a major centre of the Comintern conspiracy’. 37

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Pincher further alleges that Smedley was friendly with Roger Hollis, then employed in the advertising department of British American Tobacco, later to become the knighted Director General of MI5 – Britain’s intelligence bureau – and, according to Pincher, along with Burgess, MacLean, Philby and Sir Anthony Blunt, a Soviet agent: a spy. History has many cunning passages: that much we can claim to know. Thus the lunch group: Shaw, Madame Sun, Lu Xun, Cai Yuanpei, Harold Isaacs, Lin Yutang and Agnes Smedley. And Yang Xingfo. But first, there were or rather were not the Rotarians. Lin Yutang puts it in perspective: Bernard Shaw once looked in at Shanghai and looked out again. On the morning of his arrival, the papers reported that the local Rotary Club had decided to snub Shaw by letting him ‘pass unnoticed.’ The apparent implication was, of course, that Shaw would suffer such terrible disgrace from being passed unnoticed by the local Rotarians that he would never be able to recover his reputation. That was, of course, very intelligent on the part of the Shanghai Rotarians in view of the fact that the Hong Kong Rotarians had been worse than snubbed by Bernard Shaw. But it would have been still more intelligent to decide not to read Shaw altogether. Shaw had aroused, besides, such a scare among the Shanghai respectable society by urging the Hong Kong students to study communism that the entire Shanghai foreign press was in hiding that morning for fear of coming into contact with him. The attitude of the Rotary Club was but typical. The only thing, however, that will go down to posterity about the Shanghai Rotary Club is that on the day preceding Shaw’s arrival, these Rotarians, or by Shaw’s definition, these people who ‘keep in the rut,’ called Shaw ‘Blighter,’ ‘Ignoramous,’ ‘Fa Tz’ and ‘Bakayaro.’38 Enough: pace Rotarians; there are, after all, those people Shaw did meet who now demand our attention. The day, it seems, can be divided into five phases. Of the first and the last we have an extended record in Lin Yutang’s magazine Lun Yu. Madame Sun apparently met the Empress of Britain at five in the morning and secretly took Shaw into Shanghai by tender. Although Lin Yutang accused the foreign press of hiding from Shaw, the reporter from The North China Herald had a different story: ‘With a touch of his characteristic contrariness, Mr. G. B. Shaw contrived to disappoint such people as were interested in his arrival at Shanghai . . . ’39 namely reporters


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from the foreign press who were left cooling their heels at the Customs jetty while Shaw chuntered about with the people he had gone out of his way not to disappoint: Before he left Hong Kong, Shaw sent a cable to Madame Soong Chingling [Madame Sun] informing her that he would pay her a visit. Madame Sun, considering Shaw’s age and the fact that this was his first trip to China, went all the way to meet him . . . accompanied by two friends. Shaw said he would have had no intention of leaving the ship when it arrived in Shanghai were it not for his wish to meet Madame Sun . . . .40 The trip from ship to Shanghai and back again lasted for four hours – time enough for ‘Shaw, the outspoken conversationalist, to comment on a wide range of topics wittily’.41 The major concern was politics, specifically the example of Soviet Russia. In the rapporteur’s words, ‘during the four hour conversation, Shaw never stopped discussing this’.42 Alas, there was, moreover, the usual discourse on Stalin: What is freedom? The British give the Indians a free trial by jury, in which the judge would go back on the verdict if the jury decided that the accused should be released, and send him to jail. This is the so-called free system of the British. And what about the freedom of speech in various countries? Only a privileged few have the right to say a few words. The freedom of speech or democracy that is truly valuable should give to peasants and workers the freedom to cry aloud when they are hurt, and improve their conditions subsequently. This is the freedom that the Russians have. I paid close attention to Stalin. When we were talking to him, everyone thought that we had only talked for twenty-five minutes, but actually we had been talking for two and a half hours already. He seemed to pay little attention to theory. He is a practical man. He finds solutions to problems by experiments, and calls all successful projects Marxism . . . . He values the objective and not the theory. He may be unscrupulous in trying to reach his goal, but in the end, he manages to reach it. 43 Of course, the Russian ‘experiment’ was of considerable interest to Shaw’s audience. In central China, the Soviet in Jiangxi Province was seen by Madame Sun’s brother-in-law, Chiang Kaishek, as a greater menace than the Japanese in Manchuria: in 1935 his encirclement of the centre

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of Chinese Communism necessitated the Long March and, ironically, his own defeat. For Madame Sun herself the issue was clear and her loyalties manifest. In conversation again: SHAW: The Peace Conference cannot stop the war, and neither can we end a war by starting another war. Only when all nations are determined to have peace can the war be ended. The people themselves do not want war. After the European War, all the nations that took part discovered that they were worse-off than before. Everyone was destroyed. Facts like these can make people weary of war. The League of Nations has a tool called the International Committee of Intellectual Cooperation. If all the Intellectuals in the world can make use of this tool, it may be more effective than forming another conference. M ADAME SUN: . . . The only effective way to eliminate wars is to eliminate the system which gives rise to wars – the capitalist system. SHAW: But aren’t we all capitalists? I admit that I am – to a certain degree. Aren’t you? M ADAME SUN:

No. Not entirely.44

And so we move to the day’s second phase – and the narrative’s crux – lunch at Madame Sun’s house on Rue Molière. Of that event there are cheerfully unsensational memories by guests Cai Yuanpei and Lin Yutang. But for Lu Xun there was, as one might expect, a dimension of complexity in this meeting. It is the ordinariness, the sanity of the man, with which Lu Xun plays. In his essay ‘Who is the Paradox?’ he teases out the contradictions which Shaw excites, shifting the balance of perceptions in order to create a point of view: He tells the truth, yet they say he is joking, laugh loudly at him and blame him for not laughing at himself. He speaks frankly, yet they say he is satiric, laugh loudly at him and blame him for thinking himself intelligent. He is not a satirist, yet they insist on calling him one, though they despise satirists and use futile satires to satirize him. He is not an encyclopaedia, yet they insist on treating him as one, questioning him about everything under the sun. And when he has answered, they grumble, as if they knew more themselves.


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He is on holiday, yet they force him to expound general principles. And when he has said a little they are annoyed, and complain that he has come to ‘spread communism.’ Some despise him for not being a Marxist writer. But if he were one, those who despise him would not look at him. Some despise him for not being a worker. But if he were one, he would never have come to Shanghai and those who despise him would not be able to see him. Some despise him for not being an active revolutionary. But if he were one, he would be imprisoned . . . and those who despise him would not mention him. He has money, yet insists upon talking about socialism. Refusing to work, he insists upon taking pleasure cruises. He insists on coming to Shanghai, insists on preaching revolution, insists on talking about the Soviet Union. He insists upon making people uncomfortable. So he is contemptible.45 Watching those who watched Shaw, Lu Xun was alert to a grotesque sense of (perhaps) unpurgeable universal bad faith. No one could actually tolerate Shaw (rightly?) for what he was: So everybody hopes for different things. The lame hope he will advocate using crutches, those with scabies hope he will praise hatwearing, those who use rouge hope he will taunt sallow-faced matrons, and the writers of nationalist literature are counting on him to crush the Japanese troops. But what is the result? You can tell the result is not too satisfactory by the great number of people who are complaining. Herein, too, lies Shaw’s greatness. 46 That passage comes from the Preface to Bernard Shaw in Shanghai, a volume of pieces (mainly journalistic) about the visit. Lu Xun edited it with a young poet, critic and teacher called Qu Qiubai; it is not strictly digressional or tangential to introduce his brief life now. In The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Jonathan Spence pays considerable attention to Qu Qiubai. Qu had spent several years in Moscow learning Russian and becoming, in his own way, a Marxist and a member, in 1922, of the Chinese Communist Party. In Shanghai, he became a central Communist Party figure, and, in 1927, its ‘de facto head . . . at the age of twenty-eight’.47 His allegiance to Stalin’s orders led to a sequence of disastrous insurrections against Kuomintang armies; as a result – in the stupifyingly cynical discourse of Stalinism – he was stripped of power

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FIGURE 1. At the home of Madame Sun in Rue Molière, Shanghai, 17 February 1933. Two people are missing. (left to right) Agnes Smedley, Shaw, Madame Sun, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun. Source: Lu Xun, 1881–1936 [Beijing, 1976], p. 78; courtesy of the British Library.

for ‘left-wing opportunism’ by Moscow. In late 1933, he joined Mao Zedong in the Soviet at Jiangxi; when Chiang Kaishek’s encircling armies forced Mao and 100,000 other Communists to start the Long March, Qu Qiubai – a sickly man – attempted to get back to Shanghai. He was captured by Nationalist soldiers. Jonathan Spence – whose account of this life is engrossing – quotes his final testament: In short, this burlesque show has come to an end; now the stage is completely empty. What difference does it make anyway even if I were reluctant to leave? What I will have is a long, long rest. I do not even have any say as to how my body should be disposed of. Farewell, all the beautiful things in the world! The Life of Klim Samgin by Gorky, Rudin, by Turgenev, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy . . . The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin – these are all worth reading. The Chinese bean curd is the most delicious food in the whole world. Good-bye and farewell!48 This collator and editor of Shaviana was executed by firing-squad on 18 June 1935. Consider now his collaborator Lu Xun having to defend his defence of Shaw’s Hong Kong performance:


FIGURE 2.

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The picture restored with Harold Isaacs and Lin Yutang.

Source: A Pictorial Biography of Lu Xun [People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1981], p. 95.

As for my defense of Shaw . . . it started with his speech at the University of Hong Kong which is a typical institution of slave education. No one dared to throw a bomb at it before. Shaw did it. He is the only person who dared. And yet the Shanghai press detested him exactly because of that. That was why I had to give him support. For to attack him that time was to promote slave education. 49 Perhaps now we are able to contemplate the images which have survived of that day: the photographs taken at Madame Sun’s house. There were two occasions at which these could have been taken; first at the lunch, before the Pen Club meeting; second immediately after it. Or at both; thus the first enigma. Of the photographs themselves there is a further mystery: compare the two versions of the ‘same’ picture reproduced here. Figure 1, from The Gate of Heavenly Peace,50 shows the luncheon group – except that it doesn’t. Figure 2 shows us the ‘true’ image of the gathering. Here we could do with an explanation, and the editors of A Pictorial Biography of Lu Xun have provided one: In commemoration of the centenary of Lu Xun’s birth we think it important to publish the album A Pictorial Biography of Lu Xun to

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document his life truthfully. The idea came to us when we saw the photos [of] Lu Xun [taken] . . . on February 17, 1933 with George Bernard Shaw, Cai Yuanpei, Soong Chingling, Agnes Smedley, Lin Yutang and Harold Isaacs. In some previous publications, Lin Yutang and Harold Isaacs had been either blocked out and replaced with stones and grass or simply cut out completely as if they had never been present. We felt it absolutely necessary to restore the truth.51 The irony of History: the more the object of knowledge seems present – look, there, the image – the greater the chance for deception. Isaacs and Lin Yutang presumably disappeared because of their critical attitudes (from different positions) towards the Chinese Communist Party. Our trust in the evidence is utterly dependent upon good faith. True images? Truer images? Then where is Yang Xingfo? Lu Xun, in his diaries, mentions Yang Xingfo’s presence at the lunch table; further more as a member of the executive of the League for Civil Rights and Cai Yuanpei’s chief assistant, he would have been one of the afternoon’s organisers. But, unlike the others, he had no reputation to afford him protection. He was, apparently, a careful, crafty man, fully aware of the dangers around him. But not careful enough: four months later, on 18 June 1933, as Yang climbed into his car outside an Academica Sinica office in Shanghai, a group of unidentified gunmen opened fire. He was killed instantly. 52 It is, therefore, further ironic to move away from Rue Molière to the Pen Club (the third phase) and the unambiguities of recorded speech as Shaw held forth before a ‘distinguished group of matrons and debutantes’53 and the disgruntled reporter from The North China Herald who managed, at last, to record these questions from Shaw: ‘Will you please tell me how a Chinese actor can do anything in the midst of such infernal uproars as one hears on your stage? In our theatre, they put a man out if he sneezes. But you have gongs and symbals [sic] and the competition of half the audience and innumerable vendors. Don’t you object?’ 54 One answer to these brusque questions is reported in the biography of their recipient, Mei Lanfang, founder of The Left Theatre Club in Shanghai and the most celebrated performer of Peking Opera in this century. The noisy drums and gongs were necessary, he said, ‘because the opera was a folk art first performed in the open air and the drums and gongs were then used to attract people to the show and the tradition


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has been kept to this day’.55 A much livelier and more comprehensive account of the Pen Club meeting appeared in the Chinese language paper Shen Bao, which was reprinted in Xiaobona zai Shanghai [Bernard Shaw in Shanghai]. Here we read of Shaw’s ironic dissertation upon culture, in the most aggressively ameliorist fashion: China and the East don’t have much culture worth speaking of, Culture, by scientific definition, is all those human activities which enable human beings to control nature. In China, except for the little culture that can still be found in the farms, there isn’t any culture to speak of. China is now importing from Western Europe, a lot of so-called ‘cultural ideas’ which have long ceased to be effective and have in fact had harmful effects on the people. . . . What good will it do to bring this sort of Western culture to China? And of his notorious speech at the University of Hong Kong: When I was in Hong Kong, I urged the students to start revolutions. But please don’t misunderstand; I didn’t ask them to go to the streets and fight the police. When the police come to suppress revolutionaries with their clubs, the safest way is to run. You should run as fast as you can so your head won’t bleed. And you don’t have to get into a confrontation with the police, for policemen are like the gun in a robber’s hand; of course you don’t want to fight against the gun when you’re robbed, nevertheless those with guns in their hands should still be beaten down. But this takes time and you cannot make it by sheer force. And finally, of his view of the Soviet Union and international socialism: The international conditions of the Soviet Union both spiritually and materially are improving vastly these days. And this systematic improvement is not only to the best interests of the Russians alone. It serves as an example for all the other countries which should learn from her strong points and start imitating her. Socialism will surely be implemented in every country sooner or later. The means and process of the revolution may appear in different forms in each country, but as all roads lead to Rome so all countries will be on the same path and the same level in the end. 56 Thus the day, 17 February 1933. Yes, talk with Madame Sun and talk at the Pen Club – that is essential to the man. But, equally, it is the cold

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silence of those photographs from the Rue Molière which seems to speak most hauntingly; silent forms that tease us out of thought as does eternity.

The Great Wall As the Shaws move northwards the remaining stages of the expedition lack focus, are blurred. The experience of Shanghai, its intensity, its meaning, obscures both the memory of Hong Kong and the anticipation of Beijing. In the latter, Shaw did get to the theatre (where he was most impressed by ‘the throwing and catching of bundles of hot towels deftly performed at great distances in the auditorium by the ushers’)57 and he did manage to visit A. C. Arlington, author of The Chinese Drama (1930); but there is, quite distinct from Shanghai and even Hong Kong, a fragility to this conclusion in China. Charlotte came down with some germ Shaw had picked up, while ‘he slipped and hurt his leg’. 58 And there was the simple fact that Beijing was another world where the academics and intellectuals were simply not terribly interested: The press only gave brief accounts of his activities during his stay and the remarks about him were often quite harsh. Shaw’s comment that China had no culture had repelled people here, for they found it really rather insulting that China had been derided. . . . 59 Besides, for people in Beijing the mind was being focused wonderfully by events at the Great Wall, just to the north. Shaw, who had said that the main reason he had for visiting China was to see the Great Wall, saw them too: On her recovery, Shaw insisted that Charlotte should go with him to see the Great Wall of China. The best way to see it, he decided, would be from an airplane which would reveal the vast expanse of the wall. . . . The plane was one of the early biplanes, their seats were open to the sky. As the plane flew low over the Great Wall, Shaw was horrified to see a fierce battle in progress just below them between the Chinese Army and a horde of armed Japanese. . . . Shaw frenziedly jabbed the shoulder of the pilot in front. ‘Turn back! Turn Back!’ he shouted. ‘I don’t like wars. I don’t want to look at this.’60 Apparently they flew back to Beijing in silence.


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Notes I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance of colleagues in the University of Hong Kong. Particular thanks are due to Anita Chan for her original translations of Chinese texts. In addition, I would like to record the help of Mimi Chan, Lawrence Wong, and Louis Wong of the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature; and of Elizabeth Sinn and Alan Birch of the Department of History. 1. H. J. Lethbridge, Hong Kong: Stability and Change (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 167. 2. The Hong Kong Telegraph, Saturday, 11 February 1933, pp. 1, 9. 3. The China Mail, Tuesday, 14 February 1933, p. 1. 4. South China Morning Post, Monday, 13 February 1933, p. 16. 5. Ibid. 6. Woo Sing Lim, The Prominent Chinese in Hong Kong (Hong Kong, 1938), p. 3. 7. Lethbridge, Hong Kong: Stability and Change, p. 176. 8. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Aesthetic Science’, Design ’46, The British Council for Industrial Design, pp. 143–4. See also Stephen Winsten, Days with Bernard Shaw (London, 1951), pp. 232–3. 9. Irene Cheng, Claro Ho Tung: A Hong Kong Lady, Her Family and Her Times (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1976), pp. 29–30. 10. Bernard Mellor, The University of Hong Kong: An Informal History, 2 vols (Hong Kong University Press, 1980), I, 37. 11. Ibid. 12. Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and their Revolutions 1895–1980 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1981), p. 159. 13. Mellor, The University of Hong Kong, p. 12. 14. South China Morning Post, Tuesday, 14 February 1933, p. 10. 15. Letter from Robert McWhirter in The Hong Kong Telegraph, Tuesday, 14 February 1933, p. 1. 16. Brian Harrison (ed.), The University of Hong Kong, the First 50 Years: 1911–1961 (Hong Kong University Press, 1962), p. 52. 17. South China Morning Post, Thursday, 16 February 1933, p. 10. 18. Ibid. 19. South China Morning Post, Saturday, 18 February 1933, p. 11. 20. The North China Herald, Thursday, 16 February 1933, p. 5. 21. South China Morning Post, Monday, 13 February 1933, p. 16. 22. Harold R. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, with an Introduction by Leon Trotsky (New York, 1938), p. 76. 23. Lu Yan, Xianggang zhanggu, vol. 3 (Xianggang, 1981), pp. 153–66. 24. Requoted, inter alia, in English in Xianggang zhanggu, p. 162. 25. Leon Trotsky, Introduction to The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, pp. xv–xvi. 26. He Jiagin (Lu Xun), ‘In Praise of Shaw’ (trans. Anita Chan), in Shen Bao, 17 February 1933; repr. in the 16-volume Lu Xun quanji (Beijing, 1981), 5, 32–3. 27. Lu Xun, ‘Some Notions Jotted Down By Lamplight’, in Selected Works (in four volumes), trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Beijing, 1980; 3rd edn), 2, 156.

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28. Christopher Isherwood (with W. H. Auden), Journey to a War (London, 1939; rev. 1973), pp. 227–8. 29. Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 1929–1939 (London, 1977; repr. 1978), p. 229. 30. Harold R. Isaacs, Introduction to Straw Sandals: Chinese Short Stories, 1918– 1933, ed. H. R. Isaacs, with a Foreword by Lu Hsun (Lu Xun) (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), p. xxxiv. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 45. 33. Soong Chingling (Madame Sun Yatsen), ‘A Call to Rally to the Protection of Imprisoned Revolutionaries, Shanghai, April 1, 1933’, in The Struggle for New China (Beijing, 1952; repr. 1953), p. 55. 34. F. H. Bradiey, ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’, in Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), I, 8. 35. Jan MacKinnon and Steve MacKinnon, (eds), Agnes Smedley: Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution, with an Introduction by J. and S. MacKinnon and an Afterword by Florence Howe (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1976), pp. ix–x. 36. Florence Howe, Afterword in Agnes Smedley: Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution, p. 174. 37. Chapman Pincher, Their Trade is Treachery (London, 1981), p. 39. 38. Lin Yutang, ‘A Talk with Bernard Shaw’, in With Love and Irony (Garden City, New York, 1945), pp. 237–8. 39. The North China Herald, 22 February 1933, p. 294. 40. ‘Bernard Shaw’s Conversations During His Stopover in Shanghai’ (trans. Anita Chan), as recorded in Lun Yu [Analects] (Shanghai, 1933), I(13): 391. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., p. 393. 43. Ibid., pp. 395–6. 44. Ibid., p. 394. 45. Lu Xun, ‘Who is the Paradox?’ in Selected Works, 3: 247–8. 46. Lu Xun, ‘Preface to Bernard Shaw in Shanghat’, in Selected Works, 3: 256. 47. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, p. 248. 48. Ibid., p. 293. 49. Lu Xun, letter to Wei Mengke, 5 June 1933 (trans. Anita Chan), in Lu Xun quanji, 3: 339–41. 50. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, illustration no. 45. 51. Editors’ Note, A Pictorial Biography of Lu Xun (People’s Fine Arts Publishing House, 1981), p. 173. Figure 2 was published on p. 95 of this volume; Figure 1 appeared on p. 78 of Lu Xun, 1881–1936 (Beijing, 1976), another pictorial biography with Chinese text. 52. John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memorial (New York, 1982). On p. 74n Fairbank reveals that an account by Isaacs of the reasons for the deletion from the picture is forthcoming. 53. The Little Critic (author of an otherwise-unsigned column), ‘On Bernard Shaw’, in The China Critic, 2 March 1933), 6(9): 238. 54. The North China Herald, 22 February 1933, p. 294. 55. Wu Zuguang, Huang Zuolin and Mei Shaowu, Peking Opera and Mei Lanfang (Beijing: New World Press, 1981), p. 5.


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56. ‘What Shaw Really Said’ (trans. Anita Chan), as recorded in Xiaobona zai Shanghai (Shanghai, 1933), pp. 106–23, passim. 57. S. Hsiung, ‘Through Eastern Eyes’, in G.B.S. at 90: Aspects of Bernard Shaw’s Life and Work, ed. S. Winsten (London, 1945), p. 198. 58. Blanche Patch, Thirty Years with G.B.S. (London, 1951), p. 95. 59. Li Jinming, ‘Bernard Shaw in Beijing and Tianjin’ (trans. Anita Chan), in Shen Bao, June 10, 1933. 60. R. J. Minney, Recollections of George Bernard Shaw (New York, 1969), pp. 133–4.

Part Two Essays II

5 The Comedy of Suffering*

And yet it was not the mystery, but the comedy of suffering that struck him; its absolute uselessness, its grotesque want of meaning. How incoherent everything seemed! How lacking in all harmony! He was amazed at the discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of existence. He was still very young.1

I Mario Praz, in The Romantic Agony, tells us that four significant versions of the Salomé story predate Wilde’s: Heine, Flaubert, Mallarmé and Laforgue were all drawn to it. But, as Praz remarks, ‘Heine and Laforgue had emptied [the subject] of all tragic content by their ironic treatment’2 while Mallarmé created an existential Salomé who expressed ‘the anguish of a sterile, lonely soul, troubled with diseased imaginings’,3 which leaves Flaubert’s more famous piece. ‘Hérodias’ is ironical in its own way – of course – but Praz’s description of a Flaubert interested in Salomé as merely the tool of her mother doesn’t exclude the experience’s meaning: ‘Take heart! He has gone down to the dead to proclaim the coming of Christ.’ ‘Now at last the Essene understood the meaning of the words: “If he is to wax, then I must wane.”’4 Flaubert’s conclusion points to its biblical sources – in our end is our beginning; in our beginning is our end; even a confused Herod is aware * Source: First appeared in Critical Quarterly, 33 (Winter 1991), pp. 41–57. 145

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something has changed: ‘This [i.e. Jesus] is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead; and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him’ (Matthew 14:2). The resurrection was a subject upon which Wilde had independent views and they appear in his play: but he had, as Praz insists, a further angle on the story; for he it was who ‘finally fixed the legend of Salomé’s horrible passion’.5 Having granted that much, Praz judges the work’s significance: Yet, as generally happens with specious second-hand works, it was precisely Wilde’s Salomé which became popular. In 1896 the play, originally written for Sarah Bernhardt – who had been prevented from performing it by the censor – had a moderate success at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre; in 1901, a year after Wilde’s death, it was given in Berlin, and since then – thanks also to the music of Richard Strauss – it has continued to figure in the repertories of European theatres. In Germany it has held the boards for a longer period than any other English play, including the plays of Shakespeare. It has been translated into Czech, into Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Catalan, Swedish, [Italian] and even Yiddish . . . The Salomés of Flaubert, of Moreau, Laforgue, and Mallarmé are known only to students of literature and connoisseurs, but the Salomé of the genial comedian Wilde is known to all the world.6 Exactly: what is it about Wilde’s ‘specious second-hand’ play that pulled so many triggers?

II Before approaching Salomé there are two more sources to note: the first is J. K. Huysman’s novel Against the Grain (A Rebours, 1883). In a letter of 12 February 1894 – a year before the catastrophe – Wilde wrote: ‘The book that poisoned, or made perfect, Dorian Gray, does not exist: it is a fancy of mine merely.’7 But, as Rupert Hart-Davis points out, in a letter of 1892 Wilde had written: ‘The book in Dorian Gray is one of the many books I have never written, but it is partly suggested by Huysmans’s A Rebours . . . It is a fantastic variation on Huysmans’s over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age.’8 Huysmans’s novel is significant not only as a hymn to the perverse, but also as its own comic pathologist. Wilde, for his part, came to regret bitterly the dangers of such artistic self-analysis: something sinister is hinted at in Dorian

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Gray’s queasy response to decadence: ‘It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music . . . produced in the mind of the lad [sic] . . . a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming . . . ’9 Having been left the book by Sir Henry Wotton, Dorian meets his mentor and confesses his reaction. ‘I thought you would like it’ is the response, to which Dorian replies ‘I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference’10 – good criticism both of A Rebours and Wilde’s relationship with it. The only unachieved passage in Dorian Gray immediately follows that exchange, where Wilde catalogues Dorian’s life of sensual obsessions with perfumes, music, jewels and stories about jewels, embroideries, ecclesiastical vestments and, finally, Renaissance poisoners. All this is a tedious variation upon Huysmans’s revelation of his hero’s perverse monomanias. In Chapter 8, Des Esseintes is suddenly obsessed by plants: this is the premise for Huysmans to play up true decadence – its fetishism of the arbitrary. The random catalogue of plants is perversely typed through the conceit of flora disgustingly analogised as fauna: this is what he wants – the opposite of the ‘natural’. They included some extraordinary specimens . . . like the Albane, that looked as if made of the semi-transparent membrane that lines an ox’s ribs, or the diaphanous film of a pig’s bladder. The Aurora Borealis for instance, had broad leaves the colour of raw meat . . . leaves that seemed swollen and sweating with dark liquor and blood. The men brought other and fresh varieties, in this case presenting the appearance of a fictitious skin marked by an imitation network of veins. Most of them, as if disfigured by syphilis or leprosy, displayed livid patches of flesh, reddened by measles, roughened by eruptions; others showed the bright pink of a half-closed wound or the red brown of the crusts that form over a scar . . . 11 Dorian Gray cannot, on this bizarre level, be comic; but Wilde took the point: this decadent tradition’s parody of conventional necessity – its ironic transformation of the arbitrary into the normative and vice versa – would make preposterous the customs and the English language of his time. Thus the dare of his aphorisms in the Preface – ‘All art is quite useless’.12 These will come to haunt Wilde: it is one thing to be a Dandy and declare that there’s only the show, but it is quite another to be telling respectable readers that ‘There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’13

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III A Rebours stayed with Wilde on his path to disgrace. In Chapter 5, Des Esseintes stands alone in his house before recently purchased portraits of Salomé by Gustave Moreau. Ellmann believes that ‘Certain sections [of Huysmans’s book] had a staggering effect upon Wilde’: the description of Moreau’s Salomé Dancing Before Herod (1876) being one of them. 14 Life’s little ironies: Wilde read the book on his honeymoon. In the work of Gustave Moreau, going for its conception altogether beyond the meagre facts supplied by the New Testament, Des Esseintes saw realized at last the Salomé, weird and superhuman, he had dreamed of . . . she was now revealed in a sense as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles, – a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like Helen of Troy of the old Classic fables, all who come near her, all who see her, all that she touches. 15 Moreau is obsessed both by the story’s perverse mortality – ‘a murderous beast of the Apocalypse’ – and the dangerous sexuality of Salomé’s image. Perhaps that was why, of all the Salomés Wilde knew (including those by Leonardo and Rubens), only Moreau’s16 satisfied him. The other picture Des Esseintes possesses is a watercolour – The Apparition (1876). In it She is almost naked; in the ardour of the dance the veils have unwound themselves, the brocaded draperies of her robes have slipped away; she is clad now only in goldsmith’s artistries and translucent gems; a gorget clips her waist like a corselet; and for clasp a superb, a wondrous jewel flashes lightnings in the furrow between her bosoms; lower, on the hips, a girdle swathes her, hiding the upper thighs, against which swings a gigantic pendant . . . 17 (italics mine) Moreau’s symbols of masculinity subvert the very lines of a female figure; the body is rounded off by masculine arms and shoulders in Salomé Dancing Before Herod; however its identity is disguised by an elaborate detailing of textured surfaces and fantastic jewels. This appealed to Wilde: ‘The first duty in life is to be as superficial as possible’; 18 which epigram echoes Baudelaire in Chapter XI of Le Peintre de


la Vie Moderne (The Painter of Modern Life): ‘In Praise of Cosmetics’ (‘Eloge du Maquillage’): Fashion should be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-à-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent repeated attempt at her reformation.19 Moreau’s images were significant: when the play was published in February 1893 (a performance with Sarah Bernhardt having been forbidden in 1892 by the Lord Chamberlain because biblical characters could not, by law, be depicted on the stage) he was unhappy with Beardsley’s illustrations: ‘My Herod is the Herod of Gustave Moreau, wrapped in his jewels and sorrow. My Salomé is a mystic . . . who worships the moon.’ 20 Thus obsessed, Wilde had himself photographed dressed as Salomé on one knee gazing down at the head in a charger. ‘I flee from what is moral as from what is impoverished. I have the same sickness as Des Esseintes.’21

IV When the production of Salomé was banned, Wilde threatened to leave England for France: ‘I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness in artistic judgment. I am not English. I am Irish which is quite another thing.’22 But what kind of other thing? Being a non-English English writer certainly tormented Yeats: No people hate as we do in whom that past [the English oppression of the Irish] is always alive, and there are moments when hatred poisons my life . . . Then I remind myself that . . . all my family names are English, and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak and write, that everything I love has come to me through English: my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate.23 But, first, Wilde was no good as a hater and, second, even if he did escape from English (temporarily into French to write the play) or England (Salomé was composed in Paris) he was nonetheless addicted to London and its stage. An English version had to be prepared – only to cast yet another shadow over his life. Caught in his passion for Lord

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Alfred Douglas, Wilde thought that by offering him the translation he would kill two birds at once: preparing an actable English play would get the lay-about lover out of his hotel bedroom. Instead he prompted tantrums: Three months later, in June [1893], we are at Goring . . . I remember quite well . . . pointing out to you that we were spoiling each other’s lives, that you were absolutely ruining mine . . . You went sullenly after luncheon. Before three days had elapsed you were telegraphing from London to beg to be forgiven and allowed to return . . . I let you come back and forgave you. Three months later still . . . new scenes occurred, the occasion of them being my pointing out the schoolboy faults of your attempted translation of Salomé.24 In the end, Wilde supervised the translation and dedicated it ‘To my friend Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, the translator of my play’ while withholding Douglas’s name from the title page. 25 Ironically, because of the French Salomé, his entanglement within the English language now meant that he was even more treacherously ensnared in its web of power, class and hatred: making the friendship public was another step towards the dock at the Old Bailey.

V Given their socio-linguistic predicament, can the Irish comment upon themselves objectively? Joyce – emphasising the nature of his own exile – wrote his essay on Wilde in the language of Italian Trieste. Obviously his own interests animate the essay ‘Oscar Wilde – The Poet of Salomé’ if only because he could conjure an un-Englished figure out of that play and De Profundis: for the rest, ‘In the tradition of Irish writers of comedy that runs from the days of Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw, Wilde became, like them, court jester to the English’. 26 There was, nevertheless, something which Joyce recognised in Wilde’s work as consistent with the tragic curve of his life: His fall was greeted by a howl of puritanical joy. At the news of his condemnation, the crowd gathered outside the courtroom began to dance a pavane in the muddy street. Newspaper reporters were admitted to the prison, and through the window of his cell fed on the spectacle of his shame. White bands covered up his name on theatre billboards. His friends abandoned him. His manuscripts were


stolen, while he recounted in prison the pain inflicted on him by two years of forced labour. His mother died under a shadow. His wife died. He was declared bankrupt and his goods were sold at auction. His sons were taken from him. When he got out of prison, thugs urged on by the noble Marquis of Queensbury were waiting in ambush for him. He was hunted from house to house as dogs hunt a hare. One after another drove him from the door, refusing him food and shelter, and at nightfall he finally ended up under the windows of his brother, weeping and babbling like a child. The epilogue came rapidly to an end, and it is not worth the effort to follow the unhappy man from the slums of Naples to his poor lodgings in the Latin Quarter where he died from meningitis in the last month of the last year of the nineteenth century . . . a Roman Catholic.27 Taking the word loosely, Joyce was onto something when he recognised the significance of Wilde’s observation that anyone who knew Dorian Gray’s ‘sin’ had to have brought it to the book; the truth of his work is ‘the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin’.28 This diagnosis may reveal too much of the physician: nevertheless, even before the fatal events of 1895 and Wilde’s ultimate loss of his worldly self, he was serious about the nature of sin. Whether he ever believed, before De Profundis, that through it the divine heart could be reached is quite another matter.

VI If I were asked of myself as a dramatist, I would say that my unique position was that I had taken the Drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it a personal mode of expression as the Lyric or the Sonnet, while enriching the characterization of the stage, and enlarging – at any rate in the case of Salomé – its artistic horizon. 29 No small claim. If we set aside the specific aesthetic argument being hinted at here (‘enriching the characterization of the stage’) Wilde’s egotism is obviously central to his creative identity. To have transformed Aristotelian action into a ‘personal mode of expression’ is a triumph but, equally, a dangerous exposure of the self’s dark corners. An anonymous informant – quoted several months after Wilde’s release – pointed to this: ‘But I think the chief cause lay in the fact . . . as he

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said . . . when he knew his fate was on him, “I thought I could do what I liked.’”30 Exactly: it is the playwright’s sane delusion that he can, by writing words on a page, make complete strangers do as he likes – real beings are moved about within his imaginary space. Unfortunately, Wilde transformed the playwright’s delusion into a psychotic illusion about the ‘necessary’ freedom of his own ‘real’ world: he thought he could say what he liked.

VII If it is true that Drama is of the surface (however personal the theme) then it is easy to understand how the Baudelairean Dandy – prophet of the new artificial age – should have been so successful in the theatre. The Picture of Dorian Gray emphasises this fact of theatricality: the cause of Sybil Vane’s suicide – Dorian’s revulsion at her rejection of drama’s superficiality – is a perverse translation of Wilde’s obsession with Moreau’s glittering surfaces and what that turns aside: the depths of conscience. In effect, Wilde’s works increasingly become parables about the surface and the voyeur, our entrapment within perceptions, turning the solipsist’s half-truth into its sinister distortion: ‘A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.’ 31 This epigram (the theatre is precisely the point at which it is simultaneously proved and defeated) reminds us that the world is as each of us perceives its surfaces; thus each world is unique and unsharable. However, the real dilemma is not the epigram’s triumph over common sense but its implications: the facts of our world are functions of our aesthetic sense. Something looks beautiful, hence we deem it valuable; equally something else is not. These truths, unique to perceived worlds, are beyond reason. In pre-1914 Vienna, amidst the beggars of Europe’s imperial capital, Adolf Hitler – failed art student and dandy – justified his antiSemitism on the grounds of an aesthetic revulsion (he was an artist after all) at his perception of Eastern Jews: Once, when passing through the Inner City, I suddenly encountered a phenomenon in a long caftan and wearing black sidelocks. My first thought was: Is this a Jew? . . . Is this a German? . . . Cleanliness, whether moral or of another kind, had its own peculiar meaning for these people. That they were water-shy was obvious on looking at them . . . The odour of these people in caftans used to make me feel ill. Beyond that there were the unkempt clothes and the ignoble exterior.32 (italics mine)


Yet such a grotesque perception of the world apparently is cause not only for its tragedies but also its comedies of cruel laughter.

VIII ‘Laughter’, wrote Baudelaire in ‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (‘De l’essence du rire’), ‘comes from the idea of one’s own superiority. A Satanic idea if ever there was one! And what pride and delusion! For it is a notorious fact that all madmen in asylums have an excessively overdeveloped idea of their own superiority: I hardly know of any one who suffers from the madness of humility . . . Laughter is Satanic: it is thus profoundly human.’33 Laughter (a spontaneous reaction to our uniquely perceived worlds) expresses our Satanic essence’s cruel pride in ridicule: this is the point of Wilde’s fable ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ (1886), which recognises that we celebrate this fact: the children of the Spanish court play at bullfights: At last . . . after a prolonged combat, during which several of the hobby-horses were gored through and through, and their riders dismounted, the young Count of Tierra-Nueva brought the bull to his knees, and having obtained permission from the Infanta to give the coup de grâce, he plunged his wooden sword into the neck of the animal with such violence that the head came right off, and disclosed the laughing face of little Monsieur de Lorraine, the son of the French Ambassador at Madrid.34 This play-version of a cruel drama immediately sets the tone – when the Dwarf entered ‘waddling on his crooked legs and wagging his huge misshapen head from side to side, the children went off into a loud shout of delight, and the Infanta herself laughed so much’ she had to be reminded that the blood royal did not make ‘so merry before those who were her inferiors in birth’.35 Is there an innocent laugh? Baudelaire concedes that children may experience shades of joy in their delight but even if their laughter is like a smile or the purring of a cat it ‘is not entirely exempt from ambition, as is only proper to little scraps of men – that is, to budding Satans’. 36 The obvious irony of Wilde’s story is, of course, that only the Dwarf experiences anything remotely like innocent joy; the children’s fable drives Baudelaire’s sardonic point home: the budding little Satans have already destroyed the innocent Dwarf. Returning to dance once again before his new friends at the palace, he sees ‘a little figure watching him’ – himself, of course, in a mirror.

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When the truth dawned upon him, he gave a wild cry of despair, and fell sobbing to the ground. So it was he who was misshapen and hunch-backed, foul to look at and grotesque. He himself was the monster, and it was at him that all the children had been laughing, and the little Princess who he had thought loved him – she, too, had been merely mocking at his ugliness, and making merry over his twisted limbs . . . The hot tears poured down his cheeks, and he tore the white rose to pieces. The sprawling monster did the same . . . It grovelled on the ground, and, when he looked at it, it watched him with a face drawn with pain. He crept away, lest he should see it, and covered his eyes with his hands.37 The truth of his appearance, the full burden of self-knowledge, brings death amidst ‘shouts of happy laughter’.38 And when the Infanta asks why he will never dance again, she is told the truth: ‘Because his heart is broken.’ To which she responds: ‘For the future let those that play with me have no hearts.’39 Nothing if not in earnest, Wilde’s fable is an ironic reflection upon the predicaments of his own comic art; on the one hand there is the union between the comic and the cruel. The Infanta is quite correct: the sentimental – the feeling – is the mortal enemy of the laugh. Wilde’s major plays are conscious of their own culture’s cruelty and thus there is a tendency towards the sentimental opposite in all but Salomé and The Importance of Being Earnest. The latter is a heartless piece of work: emotions are seen as preposterous, hence the joke of the play and its title. On the other hand, ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ leaves us stranded within its implications: is there no other way to accommodate life than through laughter – however cruel? Is Baudelaire right in stressing the inescapability of our Satanic selves? And beyond the disturbing possibility that this is indeed the case lies the recognition that laughter is but one aspect of the solipsistic half-truth of our uniquely perceived worlds. On laughing at and, in turn, being laughed at, we are creating selfknowledge: I can only know my self through your response to it; and so on in an endless sequence of reflections, for no self knows itself directly and alone. All knowledge of the self comes through external representations: the image in the mirror; the laughter of others; the picture of Dorian Gray. We know and, worse, esteem ourselves only through the truths and distortions of other beings and they, in turn, know themselves only through ours. But there is one further sombre aspect of this vision: we are what we are, we will be what we will be, responding


irrationally to the world through our unique perceptions of it while yet, above all else, being held responsible for our own self and all its acts. That is the ironic conclusion to The Picture of Dorian Gray: responsible for the actions of an irrational self, a Satanic self, an aesthetic self, we live by the illusions of moral necessities in a vengeful world ready to punish acts which – arbitrarily – it deems to be perverse. Thus The Importance of Being Earnest spins round arbitrary conditions of irrational desire within a world of social propriety and deliberately muddles the two, distilling the point in its very title and last line. Ellmann understands this: ‘In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” Wilde had repudiated marriage, the family, and private property; in his play he repudiated them by pretending they are ineradicable, urging their enforcement with a mad insistence which shows how preposterous they are.’40 This leads him to the conclusion that the play comically inverts the earlier parables of doubled lives, particularly Dorian Gray, constructing ‘its wonderful parapet over the abyss of the author’s disquietude and apprehension’.41 Indeed, Bunburying – having a secret life – is a joke sailing close to the wind: You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order that you may come up to town as often as you like. I have invented a valuable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.42

ALGERNON

Change one consonant and the play’s closet nature makes its vulgar confession. Wilde’s comedy played out the full irresponsibility of desire: the delight of its world is directly in proportion to the absence of any feeling. There is, thus, no chance for cruelty – the play is, in the best sense, heartless. It is deliberately all of the surface. However, its comic world of perverse relationships arbitrarily contrived can turn, suddenly, into something quite different – a world of doubled lives, rent-boys and blackmailers. Here compulsions and disgust become poisonously fused. The perceiving aesthetic self cannot pretend that the arbitrary but ‘necessary’ world of vengeful morality will not recoil with fury at its own image perversely projected back. That is the fact of Salomé, the work which Joyce described as Wilde’s ‘opera – a polyphonic variation on the rapport of art and nature, but at the same time a revelation of his own psyche’. 43 For which revelation – among others – he would find himself no longer Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde but merely C 3.3.

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IX The violence Wilde does to the biblical story is at the heart of Salomé’s meaning. As Matthew and Mark make clear, the conflict is between Herodias – Salomé’s mother – and John the Baptist – Jokanaan: Herod has married his brother Philip’s wife and ‘John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her’ (Matthew 14:4). Salomé is merely the innocent instrument of Herodias’s revenge and thus the story ends matter of factly enough: ‘being before instructed of her mother’ (Matthew 14:8) Salomé issues her demand; John is duly executed and ‘his head was brought in a charger, and given to the damsel: and she brought it to her mother’ (Matthew 14:11). End of story. Wilde’s conclusion is something else – a hysterical Salomé demands the head for herself and the monologue with which the play ends makes clear why: Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan. I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood . . . ? But perchance it was the taste of love . . . They say that love hath a bitter taste . . . But what of that? What of that? I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan. 44

THE VOICE OF SALOMÉ

This then is a tale of terrible lusts: the eye (desire) traduces the idea of self-control (morality) through the paradox of the mouth: here in the lips and tongue is the contradiction of the ethical imperative – the word – by the articulation of irrational perverse desire – the kiss. In the play’s dramatic logic Salomé is desired, above all, by the incestuous eyes of Herod and repudiated, above all, by the disembodied words of Jokanaan – John the Baptist. He alone refuses to look at her and this, in turn, makes Salomé her own victim: the one thing she must have, by making the eye look at her, must, above all, kiss is the unattainable mouth of the word. The kiss is fatal; for it she has Jokanaan killed and, because of it, Herod has her murdered.

X ‘Treachery is inseparable from faith’, Wilde wrote to a friend, ‘I often betray myself with a kiss.’45 When Salomé kisses the lips of the dead Jokanaan, she offers the spectacle of betrayal; uncontrollable passion – within her unique perceived world – inspires in those mediating this self-expression, nothing but disgust. Her gaze is that of mad desire: the uncontrollable eye whose power Jokanaan believed he could deny.


Where is she [Herodias] who, having seen the images of men painted on walls, the images of Chaldeans limned in colours, gave herself up unto the lust of her eye, and sent ambassadors into Chaldea?46 (italics mine) This, juxtaposed with Herod’s belief in the power of the word – . . . And when you have danced for me, forget not to ask of whatsoever you wish. Whatsoever you wish I will give it to you . . . I have sworn it . . . SALOME You have sworn it Tetrarch. HEROD And I have never broken my word . . . I know not how to lie. I am the slave of my words, and my word is the word of a king.47 HEROD

– creates the play’s conflict of the eye and its erotic mouth with the word and its abstractions. Wilde recognised in Herod’s contradictions (exalting the word even as he is transfixed by the lustful eye’s desire) a story which, given a simple amendment, explored the experiences of his own perverse world. He corrupted the original in which Salomé is innocent; instead he created a monster: Thou didst put upon thine eyes the covering of him who wouldst see his God. Well, thou hast seen thy God, Jokanaan, but me, me, thou didst never see. If thou hadst seen me thou wouldst have loved me. I, I saw thee, Jokanaan, and I loved thee. Oh, how I loved thee! . . . I was chaste and thou didst fill my veins with fire . . . 48 Thus she spoke to the eyes and kissed the dead lips; Herod cannot tolerate the experience – ‘She is monstrous thy daughter, she is altogether monstrous. In truth what she has done is a great crime. I am sure that it is a crime against an unknown God.’49 This respect for incomprehensible laws of the unseen God is, in fact, fear badly disguised: when Herodias taunts Herod over his refusal to give the Jews Jokanaan, he replies, ‘He is a holy man. He is a man who has seen God.’50 But, in truth, he understands this God in one crude way: Salomé, think of what you are doing! This man comes perchance from God. He is a holy man . . . God has put into his mouth terrible words. In the palace as in the desert God is always with him . . . At least it is possible. One does not know . . . Furthermore, if he dies some misfortune might happen to me.51

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The thoughts of an unseen God’s ‘terrible words’ are a mask of moral authority for Salomé’s death; Herod’s lustful eye prepares a vengeful sentence as he looks back, bitter with desire, on the body he can never possess: ‘I will not look at things, I will not suffer things to look at me.’ A moonbeam falls on Salomé – ‘I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan’ – and Herod’s desire becomes disgust – ‘Kill that woman!’ 52

XI ‘I will not suffer things to look at me’: at the centre of his moral turmoil are fear of the unknown God, guilt at the arbitrary lustful eye and disgust both at what he sees and how he is seen. This explains one more dimension of the unknown God: HEROD:

He raises the dead? 1st NAZARENE: Yea, sire, He raiseth the dead. HEROD: I do not wish Him to do that. I forbid Him to do that. I allow no man to raise the dead. This man must be found and told that I forbid Him to raise the dead . . . I allow no man to raise the dead. It would be terrible if the dead came back.53 This reappeared as ‘The Doer of Good’: the miracle worker returns to discover the consequences of his acts; the leper is now a debauch; the blind man now a lecher; the forgiven whore again a whore. And when He had passed out of the city He saw seated by the roadside a young man who was weeping. And He went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and said to him, ‘Why are you weeping?’ And the young man looked up and recognized Him and made answer, ‘But I was dead once and you raised me from the dead. What else should I do but weep?’54 Gide recollects Wilde telling him the parable in Morocco; 55 it is independently effective yet works within Salomé, for Wilde shares the biblical Herod’s fear of the coming order’s supreme power: the idea of resurrection is appalling because it raises the spectre of endless life recreating itself out of past crimes. Wilde understood the relevance of Christ’s material ethic – how we should live – but that did not lead him to accept the idea of being born again – only for the lustful eye’s


betrayal. Resurrection is the ultimate betrayal: returning to fall yet again allows no escape from an endless capacity to sin and suffer. And this, as Joyce realised, is the psychic revelation of Wilde’s work: if the word enslaves then that is because it is confessing the eye’s anarchic dominance; it can only protest. Despite Jokanaan’s refusal to look at Salomé, perversely triumphing over his own humanity, he cannot escape the irrational: it feeds upon itself; Salomé driven mad by what she cannot have – the white body, black hair and red lips – consummates her self-destruction with the necrophiliac kiss: ‘If thou hadst seen me thou wouldst have loved me. I saw thee, Jokanaan, and I loved thee.’56 No ethical system can transform that fact: certainly not the word of the unseen God. All the more important, therefore, was Christ’s insistence upon the profound concept of forgiveness. And in Salomé this is understood; unlike Christ, Jokanaan calls for retribution against Herodias: ‘Thus saith the lord God, Let there come a multitude of men. Let the people take stones and stone her . . . ’57 As Wilde pointed out to Lord Alfred Douglas, in his letter from prison, a belief in the wrath of the unknown God – Herod’s God, Jokanaan’s God, England’s God – is another lie against life: ‘And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.’58 If we are all doomed to betrayal and subsequent punishment, then living in a world without redemption would be intolerable. Of the perverse kiss’s transcendent treachery – the wordless mouth, the silent lips – betraying the conjunction of the ethical (love) and the aesthetic (desire), Christ is all too aware: for what other reason can he so insist upon forgiveness? Wilde posed as Salomé because of the kiss. Reckless in the theatre of the Old Bailey he would act the playwright and with his own mouth confess its terrible potency: This is in your introduction to Dorian Gray: ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.’ That expresses your view? – My view on art, yes . . . Then a well-written book putting forward perverted moral views may be a good book? – No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. A perverted novel might be a good book? – I don’t know what you mean by a ‘perverted’ novel. Then I will suggest Dorian Gray as open to the interpretation of being such a novel?59

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Having established the word ‘perverted’ within the discourse, Carson was ready to spring the trap. Wilde, playing to the audience’s laughter, seduced himself into a fatal mood of verbal omnipotence: The passage I am quoting says: ‘I quite admit that I adore you madly.’ Have you ever had that feeling? – I have never given admiration to any person but myself (Laughter) The expression was, I regret, borrowed from Shakespeare. (Laughter) Then we read ‘I want to have you all to myself’ – I should consider that an intense bore (Laughter)60 But this is the comedy of ‘real life’: Carson was about to have the last cruel laugh as Wilde talked himself out of The Importance of Being Earnest and into Salomé. Do you know Walter Granger? – Yes, he was a servant at a certain house in High-street, Oxford, and was about sixteen. They were the rooms of Lord Alfred Douglas, and I have stayed there several times. Were you on familiar terms with Granger? Did you have him to dine with you? – No, he waited at table. Did you ever kiss him? – He was a peculiarly plain boy. He was, unfortunately, very ugly. I pitied him for it. Do you say that in support of your statement that you never kissed him? – No; it is such a childish question to ask me. Do you suggest that he was too ugly? – (Warmly): I did not say that. Why did you mention his ugliness? – The question seemed to me merely an intentional insult on your part, such as I have been going through the whole of this morning. Why did you mention his ugliness? I am obliged to ask you these questions. – It is ridiculous to imagine that any such thing could have possibly occurred under any circumstances. Then why did you mention his ugliness? – For that reason. If I was asked why I did not kiss a doorpost, I should say, ‘Because I do not like to kiss doorposts,’ and then am I to be cross-examined because I do not like it? Why did you mention his ugliness? – (Excitedly): You stung me by an insulting question. Was that a reason that you should say that the boy was ugly? – Pardon me, I say that you sting me and insult me, and try to unnerve me in every way, and at times one says things flippantly when one should speak more seriously. I admit it.


Then you mentioned his ugliness flippantly? That is what you wish to convey now? – Oh, do not say that I want to convey anything. I have given you my answer. But is that it? It was a flippant answer? – Yes, certainly, it was a flippant answer. 61 He confessed the lustful eye even as he invoked the sentimental moralist: ‘I pitied him for it.’ Those words made him, in turn, the Dwarf of his own story: We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour. On November 13th 1895 I was brought down here from London. From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at . . . Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. When people saw me they laughed. 62 ‘And when the verdict was announced’, wrote Yeats, ‘the harlots in the streets danced upon the pavements’.63

Notes 1. Oscar Wilde, ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, with an Introduction by Vyvyan Holland (London, 1966), p. 176. 2. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, with a Foreword by Frank Kermode (Oxford, 1970), p. 316. 3. Ibid., p. 318. 4. Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales: Trois contes, translated by Robert Baldick (Penguin Books, 1961), p. 124. 5. Praz, The Romantic Agony, p. 312. 6. Ibid., pp. 316–17. 7. Oscar Wilde, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford, 1962), p. 116. 8. Ibid. 9. Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 101. 10. Ibid., p. 102. 11. J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain: A Rebours, with an Introduction by Havelock Ellis (New York, 1969), p. 85. 12. Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 17. 13. Ibid. 14. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), p. 238. 15. Huysmans, Against the Grain, p. 53. The French text (Editions Fasquelle, Paris, 1965, p. 86) ends: ‘tout ce qu’elle touche’ which is rendered in the

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16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Stalin on Linguistics and other Essays English of the cited translation as ‘all that touches her’: I have accordingly amended the passage’s conclusion. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 232. Huysmans, Against the Grain, p. 55. Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 1205. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays: Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964), pp. 54–5. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 355. Ibid., p. 325. Ibid., p. 352. W. B. Yeats, ‘A General Introduction for my Work’, Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), p. 519. Wilde, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 160. Ibid., p. 113. James Joyce, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salomé’, Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Richard Ellmann (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1969), p. 58. Ibid. Ibid., p. 60. Wilde, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 288. Jonathan Goodman, The Oscar Wilde File (London, 1988), p. 141. Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 1205. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated and annotated by James Murphy (London, 1938), pp. 58–60. Charles Baudelaire, ‘On the Essence of Laughter: De l’essence du rire’, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, pp. 152–3. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 237. Ibid. Baudelaire, ‘On the Essence of Laughter’, p. 156. Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 246. Ibid. Ibid., p. 240. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 399. Ibid. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 326. James Joyce, ‘Oscar Wilde: the Poet of Salomé’, Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 60. Oscar Wilde, Salomé in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 575. This point comes from René Girard, ‘Scandal and the Dance: Salomé in the Gospel of Mark’, New Literary History, vol. XV, no. 2, Winter 1984, pp. 311–24. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 500. Wilde, Salomé in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 557. Ibid., p. 569. Ibid., p. 574. Ibid. Ibid., p. 563.

The Comedy of Suffering 163 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Ibid., pp. 571–2. Ibid., p. 575. Ibid., p. 565. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Doer of Good’, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 864. André Gide, ‘In Memoriam’, Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 29–30. Wilde, Salomé in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 574. Ibid., p. 565. Wilde, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 193. Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic; Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, edited by Richard Ellmann (London, 1970), pp. 437–8. Goodman, The Oscar Wilde File, p. 54. Ibid., p. 65. Wilde, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, p. 219. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Tragic Generation’, Autobiographies (London, 1966), p. 291.

6 Totalitarian Logic: Stalin on Linguistics*

No, no: arrests vary very widely in form. In 1926 Irma Mendel, a Hungarian, obtained through the Comintern two front-row tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre. Interrogator Klegel was courting her at the time and she invited him to go with her. They sat through the show very affectionately, and when it was over he took her – straight to the Lubyanka. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956, Chapter 1, ‘Arrest’

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. Genesis 11:7

I Confronting evil men, areas of human experience are often deemed sacrosanct in order to preserve them from the minds we are casting out. Thus it is a commonly held belief that Adolf Hitler was a ‘house-painter’. This assertion is made in order to preserve the transcendental dignity of the concept ‘artist’. The irony of the canard’s refutation is that Hitler was not only a ‘painter’ but also an aspiring architect: a water colourist who, at one point in his early Viennese years, attempted to survive by selling paintings on postcards in the streets by day, returning to the doss-house at night. 1 In the history of black propaganda this is an interesting example of a major value-distortion: the idea of ‘house-painter’ * Source: First appeared in Critical Quarterly, 35 (1993), pp. 16–36. 164

Stalin on Linguistics 165

as an honest occupation can snobbishly be discredited in order to preserve the lofty ideal of artist. Vegetarian dog-loving Hitler could not have become a ‘house-painter’ since he never did an honest day’s work in his life. Except in the trenches. The same principle applies to the following from a review in the Times Literary Supplement of books about Khrushchev. ‘He did not express his beliefs in the way of his predecessors. Not for him the theorizing of Lenin’s State and Revolution or the incantatory rantings of Stalin’s Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.’2 In this we have the ‘house-painter’ principle preserving a valued area of human activity from contamination by evil genius: for it may be that the only incantatory rantings to be found here will be in the incantatory rantings of ‘incantatory rantings’: the phenomenon of high seriousness’s folly is, in fact, not Stalinesque whimsy but rather a studied response to particular political questions with the Man of Steel being a lot less than loony and rather more than merely rational. Which is always where the real trouble begins.

II With Stalin’s Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, Isaac Deutscher confesses to being perplexed: suddenly this peculiar subject is taken up at the very moment of the Korean War: For about five years he made not a single public utterance (apart from a few trite interviews accorded to foreign journalists; but the journalists were hardly ever admitted to his presence; they received in writing his answers to their questions). When in the anxious early days of the Korean war he chose to make a pronouncement, it was on – linguistics. In a series of letters, filling many pages in an enlarged edition of Pravda, he attached the academic school of N. Y. Marr, which had for nearly three decades been the authorized Marxist interpreter of language. Stalin, uninhibited by the scantiness of his own knowledge – he had only the rudiments of one foreign language – expatiated on the philosophy of linguistics, the relationship between language, slang, and dialect, the thought processes of the deaf and dumb, and the single world language that would come into being in a remote future, when mankind would be united in communism. Sprinkling his Epistle with a little rose water of liberalism, he berated the monopoly the Marr school had established in Soviet linguistics and protested against the suppression of the views of its opponents. 3

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Linguistics after five years’ silence? What was the unpredictable Georgian up to apart from being, of course, predictably unpredictable? The incident certainly haunted Solzhenitsyn: that Stalin is found in chapter 19 of The First Circle – ‘Language is a Tool of Production’ – to be engaged with the problems of linguistics seems grotesquely appropriate in its very incongruity. The tone is Olympian condescension, observing the little monster attempting to struggle with a crushing problem: is language of the superstructure or the base? if language is a superstructure, why doesn’t it change with every epoch? If it is not a superstructure, what is it? A basis? A mode of production? Properly speaking, it’s like this: modes of production consist of productive forces and productive relationships. To call language a relationship is impossible. So does that mean language is a productive force? But productive forces include the instruments of production, the means of production, and people. But even though people speak language, language is not people. The devil himself doesn’t know – he was at a dead end. To be really honest, one would have to recognize that language is an instrument of production like – well, like lathes, railroads, the mail. It, too, is communications, after all. But if you put the thesis that way, declaring that language is an instrument of production, everyone will start snickering. Not in our country, of course. And there was no one to ask advice from; he alone on earth was a true philosopher. If only someone like Kant were still alive, or Spinoza, even though he was bourgeois . . . Should he phone Beria? But Beria didn’t understand anything at all. Well, he could put it more cautiously: ‘In this respect language, which differs in principle from superstructure, is not distinguishable, however, from instruments of production, from machines, let us say, which are as indifferent to class as language is.’ ‘Indifferent to class’ – that, too, could never have been said before. He placed a period after the sentence. He put his hands behind his head, yawned and stretched. He had not got very far, but he was already tired.4 Perhaps this passage is powerful because the novelist has to control his revulsion before an odious truth: nothing lies beyond the tyrant’s Godly interference; not even the language of Solzhenitsyn’s own contradictory act – this novel – can unironically transcend the totalitarian


Communist state’s Satanic comedy. The monster at its heart (in all the paranoid megalomania of his historical certainty) will sort out the only means of rebellion against his own tyranny – the Russian language itself. Thus the dignity of Solzhenitsyn’s indignation animates his writing, giving his voice that historical authority setting him apart from ordinary attempts to wish away the significance of Stalin’s linguistic excursion, as in the following: Was Stalin aware of the grotesque nature of this business? Did he really believe that the platitudes he enunciated constituted a fundamental contribution to knowledge? Or did he simply enjoy having all those professors and academicians jump through the hoop? Did he take in good faith the chorus of sycophantic praise that rang through the Communist World, celebrating his immortal work? By now, even in his own mind, Stalin would have been incapable of answering these questions. The linguistics affair, despite its apparent triviality, is one of the most telling episodes of Stalin’s entire career. The urge to struggle, to seek out and destroy enemies, which had prompted young Soso Djugashvili to enter the revolutionary path, continued unabated in the aging tyrant. The middle-aged Stalin, like all successful politicians, advanced his career by seeking and gaining allies, by impressing people with reasonableness and tolerance. But in the end as in the beginning there was the terrible passion to destroy the ‘impure’ ones, be it a loyal servant . . . or a professor he had never known . . . 5 And yet to see all this linguistics simply as one more incident – however important – in an individual psychodrama, underestimates the phenomenon’s whole wretchedness: in fact, something significant – affecting nations and their histories – is being played for by the Great Genius: so to start again . . . four letters to a total of five scholars in linguistics were far removed from any pressing practical matter. It was evidently a reflection of Stalin’s amateur interest in the field, which appeared in his editing of Georgian-to-Russian poetic translation, his enquiries of Enver Hoxha concerning the Albanian language, and his questions to the Indian ambassador Menon about the languages of India. The main point of Stalin’s disquisition on linguistics was to overturn the prevailing theory in Soviet scholarship since the early 1930s, the eccentric notions of the Georgian N. Ya. Marr, who had died in 1934.6

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Returning to the sceptical Deutscher, his account suggests that the young Stalin was hardly father to the enfeebled buffoon of Solzhenitsyn’s portrait: at the age of sixteen, ‘only a year after leaving the Gori school, he was already publishing verses in a leading Georgian periodical’; 7 a year after his arrival at the Seminary at Tiflis – the leading institute of higher education in Georgia – Deutscher reports that his literary ambitions flourished: While he was still in the first form, Djugashvili must have made frequent half-stealthy excursions into town and got in touch with the members of the opposition. This can be seen from the fact that a poem by him was published in the Georgian periodical Iberya, edited by the liberal patriot Ilya Chavchavadze, on 29 October 1895, almost exactly a year after Djugashvili’s arrival at Tiflis. He dedicated the verses, patriotic in character but coloured with social radicalism, to a well-known Georgian poet, R. Eristavi. They appeared under the signature ‘Soselo’ (‘little Joe’), for the author must have been anxious to conceal his identity from the seminary authorities. His other offence was to borrow books from a circulating library in town. Apart from Georgian poetry, the masterpieces of Russian and European literature were his favourite reading. Most of all he enjoyed the three great Russian satirical writers, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Gogol, and Chekhov, whom he afterwards frequently quoted in speeches and articles. Victor Hugo’s novels and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, in Russian translations, figure among the foreign books he read. Of greater importance to his development were popular books on Darwinian biology, on economics and sociology.8 One more fact about the young tyrant: the linguistic patriot was equally a realist; at school in Gori, he assiduously mastered the language of power: ‘His success in learning Russian is attested by his survival in a school that operated in this language, and one fellow-pupil . . . recalls how hard Iosif worked on this, “how absolutely flawlessly he wrote in Russian, what clear handwriting he cultivated on his own”.’ 9 On the other hand, he spoke Russian with ‘a Georgian accent . . . swallow[ing]’ his case-endings, hoping . . . that this would cover his uncertainties concerning the mysteries of Russian grammar’10 – suggesting a subject already aware of the linguistic act’s deep resonances. Solzhenitsyn’s art argues that the man must ultimately have been orphaned by such a child as this: nevertheless his interest in literature, particularly foreign literature (‘by 1896 he was caught reading in Russian


translation a variety of forbidden western books, novels by Hugo and Thackeray, general works on culture and the social sciences’11), was a genuine factor in leading him away from the monks’ control as he descended the underworld of dissidence, coming finally to rest within a socialist circle in Tbilisi, the ‘Third Group’. Having made some progress in such studies, in August 1898 Iosif joined an organization that was attempting to move beyond mere ‘circle’ activity to political action among the workers of Tbilisi, the so-called ‘Third Group’. In undertaking this activity, which exposed him to the risk of arrest, Dzhugashvili had need of a pseudonym and chose ‘Koba’. This was somewhat pretentious, for that was the name of the hero of a well-known romantic nationalist Georgian novel . . . The Patricide. It is possible that Soso had been called Koba as a lad in Gori, having been impressed then by this heroic figure, but it is unlikely that he was called that in his seminary days. A revolutionary could not conceal his identity from the police by using his wellestablished nickname. ‘Koba’ was the first of many cover-names which he utilized in the following years, but the only one, apart from ‘Stalin’, that stuck. At least a few of his old friends still called him ‘Koba’ in the years of his eminence.12 ‘Koba’ reinforces a sense of the young Stalin’s alertness to the talismanic power of the word. Koba was not, of course, ‘Stalin’ but still Iosif Djugashvili, i.e. that son of his own father: of the name Stalin, there is one more story yet to consider. Iosif Djugashvili first used the pseudonym which he made famous on 1 December 1912, when he signed an article in the Bolsheviks’ St Petersburg newspaper Pravda as ‘K. Stalin’. His biographers generally point out that the name ‘Stalin’ is based on the Russian word for steel and hence was meant to signify that Djugashvili-Stalin was a ‘man of steel’. 13 In fact, ‘Stalin’ was the final version of three earlier attempts to establish a nominal identity following ‘Stefin’, ‘Salin’ and ‘Solin’. 14 The orthodoxy regarding the word’s shape is that Stalin was attempting to create a name which would give him an irrefutable linguistic identity with Lenin. Robert Himmer, however, offers a different explanation: what then was the relationship between ‘Stalin’ and ‘Lenin’? . . . [T]he answer [lies] in the record of Djugashvili’s attitude toward Lenin in the years prior to the adoption of the name ‘Stalin’ in December

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1912 . . . [F]ollowing Lenin’s retreat from advocacy of insurrection after the revolutionary failures of 1905, Djugashvili became increasingly disenchanted with Lenin – a disenchantment that sprang from Djugashvili’s uncompromising hatred of class enemies, his mistrust of émigrés and intellectuals, and his self-image as a man of destiny. While the émigré intellectual Lenin turned to parliamentary politics, Djugashvili continued to favor armed revolt and strove to enhance the role within the party of ordinary workers, whom he represented in his writings as the real heroic leaders of revolutionary socialism. When, a few days before his thirty-third birthday, he took the name ‘Stalin,’ he was proclaiming himself the truest of these true revolutionaries, the new champion of the ‘hard’ revolutionary creed that Lenin had once represented. ‘Stalin’ was an expression of Djugashvili’s belief in a revolution of class war, of his self-image as its rightful hero, and of his consequent dissatisfaction with the leadership of the temporizing Lenin. 15 On his way to becoming the Man of Steel, Iosif had realigned certain characteristics: Georgians – like Jews, intellectuals and émigrés – were deemed to be ‘deficient in the revolutionary consciousness . . . essential for a real Bolshevik’. 16 Did it then follow that the fully created hard man abandoned all the linguistic sensitivities so conspicuous in childhood and adolescence? On the contrary: the first article to appear above that notorious name was flawed by grammatical errors, gross stylistic awkwardness, and poor choice of words – as if written by an ordinary proletarian trying to make sense of the confusion within the party. Djugashvili’s pose as an ordinary working man when he first used the name ‘Stalin’ expressed a belief that he, not Lenin, was the rightful leader of the revolutionary proletariat.17 Such dissimulation reinforces the thesis that Stalin knowingly manipulated language’s immense power; it was a phenomenon over which he had complete control: creating or recreating the self and its world was simple. Nevertheless, in and of itself, language remained a matter of great significance: indeed even more ironically perhaps than Solzhenitsyn realised in chapter 19 of The First Circle: ‘Language is a tool of production’. It was exactly that: an instrument of political power. And if suddenly he was made aware that Marxist linguistics had got into a muddle over how that should be so, then it was entirely natural that he


should correct error and see the people right, which is precisely what he does in Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.

III In the world of Stalin, if there was a problem then somebody must be to blame: that’s only fair, after all. The whole of The First Circle’s Mavarino Institute – i.e. prison – in which various intellectuals toil over the elusive vocoder (the telephone scrambler) which will make sure that the Great Genius’s conversations are secure from treacherous eavesdroppers is dedicated to that principle. The history of an isolated peripheral figure like Mamurin, the Man in the Iron Mask, makes the point: It happened that the Leader of All Progressive Humanity once talked with Yenan Province and was dissatisfied with the squeals and static on the telephone. He called in Beria and said in Georgian: ‘Lavrenty! What kind of an idiot have you got as head of communications? Get rid of him.’ So they got rid of Mamurin; that is, they imprisoned him in the Lubyanka. 18 In the case of language, the idiot in charge was one Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr. He fits the insane world of Stalin’s Soviet Union exactly – indeed Marr is character enough to torment one of Solzhenitsyn’s hells. His dates – 1865–1934 – saved him from experiencing correction at the hand of the Leader of All Progressive Humanity but his posthumous reputation ultimately reserved him a place in the collective demonology. The son of an eighty-seven-year-old Scot and a Georgian mother, Marr grew up in Georgian surroundings. He attended the Classical Gymnasium at Kutaisi, and while at school he endeavoured to mend the ‘broken’ speech which he had acquired in early childhood, when immersed in that atmosphere of faulty Russian combined with Georgian which had served his parents as a medium of communication. (It appears, however, that Marr – like Stalin, who was also of Georgian origin – never quite achieved perfection in Russian stress and intonation patterns.) After successfully completing his schooling, Marr finally decided to read Oriental languages, despite attempts (recorded in an autobiographical sketch of 1927, published in the periodical Ogonëk, No. 27/223) on the part of both teachers and

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fellow pupils to dissuade him. He qualified for entry to the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the University of St. Petersburg in 1884, and embarked on the comparative study of Persian, Georgian, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and Turkish. Two years later, having acquired a knowledge of Semitic language structures, he was struck by an apparent similarity between Georgian and Arabic, and in 1888 he published an article on the nature and characteristics of Georgian which appeared in [a] Tbilisi paper . . . In this article, written in Georgian, Marr attempts to correlate Georgian, both lexically and structurally, with Semitic: ‘The Georgian language, both flesh and spirit, i.e. in its lexical roots and grammatical conformation, is related to the Semitic languages, but the relationship is not so close as that among the Semitic languages themselves.’ (A much fuller formulation was to come ten years later, in his preface to the Paradigms of Old Georgian Grammar, under the heading ‘Preliminary remarks on the relationship of Georgian to the Semitic languages’ . . . which was published in 1908.) After completion of his initial course at the Faculty of Oriental Studies (1888), Marr turned his attention to an ever increasing extent to aspects of Armenian folklore, history, literature and philology. He made repeated visits to Armenia, and in 1892–3 participated in excavations at Ani, ancient town of Armenia near Lake Van (now in Turkey). He appears to have aroused the hostility of the Georgian nationalist Prince Chavchavadze, who took exception to Marr’s discovery that the Georgian Bible had been translated from the Armenian, and that the fable underlying Shota Rust’aveli’s twelfth century heroic poem ‘The knight in the tiger’s skin’ (‘Vityaz’ v tigrovoi shkure’) was actually of Persian origin. In 1901, in the face of some considerable opposition, he was appointed to the chair of Armenian at the University of St. Petersburg; and he was awarded his doctorate two years later, in 1903. In 1909 he was recommended for membership of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and his election followed in 1912. Marr’s work in the Caucasus, and his numerous field studies, lie at the base of his early linguistic theories. ‘All my creative linguistic ideas’, he writes in Ogonëk (op. cit.), ‘are not the outcome of work in the study. They were conceived and moulded in the course of my contacts with man and nature, in streets and market-places, in deserts and on the seas, in the mountains and in the steppes, by rivers and springs, on horseback and in trains – anywhere but in the study.’ He was particularly concerned with detecting, in the South


Caucasian languages and in living Armenian, where Indo-European had overlaid the original Urartian (an idiom probably related to Hurrian, and written in cuneiform), traces of those archaic elements which could establish a link with Semitic.19 Fair enough – although the obsessive quality of Marr’s life, his refusal to be dissuaded by teachers and students from following his destiny, is in ironic contrast to the casually arbitrary reasoning by which Solzhenitsyn imagines the World’s Greatest Marxist being drawn into linguistic controversy: the whole business is actually no more than a squabble among Georgians. He had, in fact, chanced upon just such a felicitous concept in a completely different field, in linguistics, in connection with the recent case of Professor Chikobava of Tiflis. Chikobava had written some apparently anti-Marxist heresy to the effect that language is not a superstructure at all but simply language, that it is neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but simply national speech – and he had dared to cast aspersions openly on the name of Marr himself. Since both Marr and Chikobava were Georgians, there was an immediate response in the Georgian University journal, a gray, unbound copy of which, printed in the characteristic Georgian alphabet, lay at this moment in front of Stalin. Several linguistic disciples of Marr had attacked the insolent scholar. In the wake of their accusations he could only sit and wait for the midnight knock of the MGB. It had already been hinted that Chikobava was an agent of American imperialism. Nothing could have saved Chikobava if Stalin had not picked up the phone and let him live. He would let him live – and would himself give the man’s simple, provincial thoughts an immortal exposition and a brilliant development. True, it would have been more impressive to refute the counterrevolutionary theory of relativity, for example, or the theory of wave mechanics, but because of affairs of state he simply did not have the time. Philology, however, was the next thing to grammar, and, in respect to difficulty, Stalin had always put grammar on a level with mathematics.20 To Solzhenitsyn, Stalin’s grotesque interest in linguistics is an exact synecdoche for the multiple betrayals of language which cancerously

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tissue Soviet life: the phonologist Rubin ultimately identifies Innokenty Volodin from the tapes of his bugged telephone conversation as the voice warning a medical researcher about to visit Paris not to let French scientists in upon his secret discovery of a possible cure for some particularly wretched disease. Marr’s ridiculous part in the novel’s moral scheme is scornfully alluded to: ‘The transitory nature and unreality of the concept are implicit in the word itself. The word “happiness” is derived from the word that means this hour, this moment.’ ‘No, dear Professor, pardon me. Read Vladimir Dahl. “Happiness” comes from a word that means one’s fate, one’s lot, what one has managed to hold on to in life. The wisdom of etymology gives us a very mean version of happiness.’ ‘Just a minute! My explanation comes from Dahl, too.’ ‘Amazing. So does mine.’ ‘The word ought to be researched in all languages. I’ll make a note of it!’ ‘Maniac!’ ‘Never mind! Let me tell you something about comparative philology –’ ‘You mean the way everything is derived from the word “hand” – as Marr would say?’ ‘Go to hell. Listen – have you read the second part of Faust?’21 The narrative’s sustained objection, at one level, is to rationality’s perversion: the phonologist Rubin’s specialist knowledge means no more than the ruination of another human life. And, at another, there is a hostility to Marr’s reductionism: fining language down to a single source is a shabby way of decoding life’s plurality. The ultimate example of this evil is centred upon Stalin himself: everything in Russia comes down to one sadistically arbitrary jester. And so Marr deserved his place in the lunatic hells of The First Circle. N.S. Trubetskoi, reviewing an article by Marr, asserted that the piece should properly be examined ‘by a psychiatrist. Marr’s theories were worthy only of Martynov . . . a Russian mental patient at the end of the nineteenth century who published a pamphlet . . . [proving] that the words of all human languages can be traced back to the one root word meaning “to eat”’.22 The spectre of that reductionism haunts Solzhenitsyn: Marr’s work is simply another example of its evil.


Once lunacy gets through the door it proves an ample presence: Marina Yaguello devotes a whole chapter to Marr in Lunatic Lovers of Language – a title fairly predicting the book’s contents: The only thing left to him by his father . . . to see him on his way was the following remark: ‘You’ll always be a good for nothing’. He found a father-substitute twenty years later in the person of the Arabic scholar Rosen, the only one of his teachers at the university to be well-disposed towards him, although he, just like the others, predicted that Marr would be a failure in a scholarly career. In his autobiography Marr tells how, when he succeeded after twenty years in getting his thesis on the relationship between the Caucasian and Semitic languages published, he went to seek Rosen’s approval as he lay dying. Right from childhood Marr seems to have provoked widespread hostility. He was a permanent rebel, and put everyone’s back up. He clearly had a very high opinion of himself. Poor and humiliated, a fatherless child and a foreigner (although his native language was Georgian, he was registered as ‘English’ at school), always left out, aggressive, full of himself and revengeful, he seemed right from the start to display, at least in embryonic form, all the elements of the classic picture of paranoia: repressed homosexuality, persecution mania, and megalomania, the salient social causes of which are instances of humiliation and social rejection, especially where men are concerned. 23 Whatever; the repressed, megalomaniac, paranoid Georgian ultimately – despite (or because of) these odds – made a hugely successful career out of two particular theories: the Japhetic explanation of language and a Marxist linguistics. The former took its name from Japhet – Noah’s third son: if Shem and Ham had lent their names correspondingly to the Semitic (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac etc.) and Hamitic languages (e.g. Coptic, Ancient Egyptian etc.) then what other name could be given to the speech of ‘those ancient peoples who lived to the West and North of the Hebrews – principally those dwelling in the regions adjacent to the Aegean, Black and Caspian Seas’?24 There must have been a language closely related to Semitic and Hamitic (Genesis 11:1 – ‘And the earth was of one language, and one speech’) in this geographical area which functioned as a pre-Indo-European Ursprache. As his work developed, Marr came to believe that a Caucasian-based protolanguage could be traced from pre-Hellenic Etruscan to living Basque.

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Originally . . . – according to Marr – there was one primeval substratum or common means of human communication in the Mediterranean world, Japhetic; and the coup de grâce to Japhetic unity was administered by the emergence of Indo-European, which induced the process of hybridization, in itself a form of re-creation. In this way, he concludes, Japhetism had contributed, if only vicariously, to the constructive remodelling of European world-culture.25 Parallel to this genetic explanation of linguistic families was Marr’s theory about the development of speech: Adopting a monogenetic approach, he conceived one common origin for all languages. This he envisaged as comprising two stages: (i) a manual or gestural (pre-phonic), which he described as linear kinetic; and (ii) a vocal or phonic, which he linked to phylogenesis, or the early formation of tribes, where an articulate form of intercommunication became essential. In connexion with the second phase, he even claimed to have identified the four monosyllabic elements which lay at the base of all future language development: [sal], [ber], [y (j) on] and [ros]; and these were allegedly uttered – in the first instance – as an aid to magic, in totemic-tribal rituals. Innumerable variations were possible (i.e. sal, zal, tsal, dal, gal, tkal, dgal, tskal, dzgal, etc.); and the eventual emergence of more differentiated combinations was attributed to the crossing of tribes as ethnic groups began to crystallize. Marr’s views on the origin of language were essentially phylocentric (or tribal-oriented) in the first instance, and closely connected with his early field studies.26 But with Marr there is always another step down the explanatory ladder: When we turn our gaze back towards the dark ages with the aim of elucidating the fundamental principles of human language . . . we are faced with a crucial and highly tricky question: which are the most primitive representations? Which is primary, the sky or the hand? Japhetic linguistics takes us back, following the laws laid down by the paleontology of speech, from the ‘heavens’ to the ‘hand’, which therefore really is the primitive word, the hand of toiling man, of homo faber, of this creator of the whole of our material culture, including language. The hand is the unique and natural primitive vehicle of communication, just as it is the unique tool of all production, up


until the moment when this force of production belonging to homo faber creates substitutes for him in the form of tools of production, artifacts, and objects of material culture; and it is then, and then alone, that the role of language tool is quite naturally shifted to the tongue, which, as the paleontology of speech shows us, bears the same name as the hand.27 Solzhenitsyn’s scornful dismissal in The First Circle – ‘Go to hell’ – of the materialist thesis that speech descended from the word ‘hand’ laconically brings us to the point about Marr and his theories: any assertion about correctness is manifest nonsense – the theories themselves are obviously meaningless; indeed, one might just as well go back to Genesis for a plausible account of language’s origin. Marr may have been a repressed homosexual paranoid whose work ought to be examined by a psychoanalyst but that diagnosis is as irrelevant as his own theories which brilliantly demonstrate that in this peculiar area anything goes: genetic explanations can never escape the follies of reductionism. Equally, it must be said, there is nothing with which to replace them. For the other absurd fact of life is that language is random and its evolvers, sole makers and users, are unable to explain its origins other than – apparently – mythically. Nevertheless, out of this, Marr had an ideal academic career: from humble origins and early derision, he gradually became the Stalin of linguistics, wreaking revenge on his earlier critics: ‘Thus from 1924 onwards, in addition to his chair at the University, he was in charge of the Leningrad Library and six research institutes. After 1930 when the cult of his personality began, the “Japhetic” institutions directed by Marr were quite simply named after him.’ 28 He was even luckier in death. Stalin’s critique appeared in 1950: sixteen years after his death; sixteen years beyond the hell of the Lubyanka. So why did Stalin bother? The answers to which question can be found in his pamphlet Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.

IV QUESTION:

Is it true that language is a superstructure on the base? No, it is not true. The base is the economic structure of society as the given stage of its development. The superstructure is the political, legal, religious, artistic, philosophical view of society and the political, legal and other institutions corresponding to them. ANSWER:

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Every base has its own corresponding superstructure . . . If the base changes or is eliminated, then, following this, its superstructure changes or is eliminated; if a new base arises, then, following this, a superstructure arises corresponding to it. In this respect language radically differs from the superstructure.29 Thus Stalin in medias res: twenty-seven pages later we discover the source of this grotesque misconception about language as a superstructure: N. Y. Marr introduced into linguistics the incorrect, non-Marxist formula that language is a superstructure, and got himself into a muddle and put linguistics into a muddle. Soviet linguistics cannot be advanced on the basis of an incorrect formula. N. Y. Marr introduced into linguistics another and also incorrect and non-Marxist formula, regarding the ‘class character’ of language, and got himself into a muddle and put linguistics into a muddle. Soviet linguistics cannot be advanced on the basis of an incorrect formula which is contrary to the whole course of the history of peoples and languages. N. Y. Marr introduced into linguistics an immodest, boastful, arrogant tone alien to Marxism and tending towards a bald and off-hand negation of every thing done in linguistics prior to N. Y. Marr. N. Y. Marr shrilly abused the comparative-historical method as ‘idealistic.’ Yet it must be said that, despite its serious shortcomings, the comparative-historical method is nevertheless better than N. Y. Marr’s really idealistic four-element analysis, because the former gives a stimulus to work, to a study of languages, while the latter only gives a stimulus to loll in one’s arm-chair and tell fortunes in the tea-cup of the celebrated four elements. ... To listen to N. Y. Marr, and especially to his ‘disciplines,’ one might think that prior to N. Y. Marr there was no such thing as the science of language, that the science of language appeared with the ‘new doctrine’ of N. Y. Marr. Marx and Engels were much more modest: they held that their dialectical materialism was a product of the development of the sciences, including philosophy, in earlier periods. 30 These denunciations follow on from a logical sequence of theoretical positions starting from an obvious question: if language is not of the superstructure, where, within a Marxist analysis, must it function?


In this respect language radically differs from the superstructure. Language is not a product of one or another base, old or new, within the given society, but of the whole course of the history of the society and of the history of the bases for many centuries. It was created not by some one class, but by the entire society, by all the classes of the society, by the efforts of hundreds of generations. It was created for the satisfaction of the needs not of one particular class, but of the entire society, of all the classes of the society. Precisely for this reason it was created as a single language for the society, common to all members of that society, as the common language of the whole people. Hence the functional role of language, as a means of intercourse between people, consists not in serving one class to the detriment of other classes, but in equally serving the entire society, all the classes of society. This in fact explains why a language may equally serve both the old, moribund system and the new, rising system; both the old base and the new base; both the exploiters and the exploited. It is no secret to anyone that the Russian language served Russian capitalism and Russian bourgeois culture before the October Revolution just as well as it now serves the socialist system and socialist culture of Russian society. The same must be said of the Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Georgian, Armenian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Tatar, Azerbaijanian, Bashkirian, Turkmenian and other languages of the Soviet nations; they served the old, bourgeois system of these nations just as well as they serve the new, socialist system.31 But how significant is the ultimate consequence of the view that language is extra-revolutionary: if not part of the dialectic, where does it exist? The answer is – in a word – everywhere; Stalin, it seems, is, if anything, a vulgar Wordsworthian: Language, on the contrary, is connected with man’s productive activity directly, and not only with man’s productive activity, but with all his other activity in all his spheres of work, from production to the base, and from the base to the superstructure. For this reason language reflects changes in production immediately and directly, without waiting for changes in the base. For this reason the sphere of action of language, which embraces all fields of man’s activity, is far broader and more comprehensive than the sphere of action of the superstructure.32

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If Marr’s first error was to associate language with superstructure, his second was to link it to social class: Is it true that language always was and is class language, that there is no such thing as language which is the single and common language of a society, a non-class language common to the whole people? ANSWER: No, it is not true.33 The reason it is not true is as follows: ‘History shows that national languages are not class, but common languages, common to all the members of each nation and constituting the single language of that nation.’ 34 This is a refutation of another Marr error: ‘languages used by members of the same class of society in countries with identical social structures showed greater topological kinship with one another than with “different-ranking” dialects or sociolects from their native environments’. 35 Taken to extremes, on this argument there could only be – according to Stalin’s interpretation – class languages. Marr’s excessive zeal in serving the Party has only led to error, for the truth is that ‘the upper strata of the propertied classes . . . [who] detest the people’36 while having their own fashionable cant must draw ‘all the fundamentals, that is, the overwhelming majority of the words and grammatical system . . . from the common, national language’.37 Moreover ‘Marx . . . recognize[d] the necessity of a single national language, as a higher form, to which dialects, as lower forms are subordinate’.38 Misinterpreting Engels’s remarks in The Condition of the Working Class in England concerning the chasms between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (that the former ‘speak other dialects, have other thoughts and ideals, other customs and moral principles, a different religion and other politics’ 39 from the latter) Marr’s confusion of superstructure with language excludes class dialects from the whole of a national language. Language and culture are not the same: ‘language, as a means of intercourse, is always a language common to the whole people and can serve both bourgeois and socialist culture’. 40 Stalin’s insistence upon a national language is the significant point and it is important to register what he is willing to forgo in order to reject the ‘class-character’ language formula. On the one hand: The mistake our comrades commit here is that they do not see the difference between culture and language, and do not understand that culture changes in content with every new period in the development of society, whereas language remains basically the same


through a number of periods, equally serving both the new culture and the old. Hence: (a) Language, as a means of intercourse, always was and remains the single language of a society, common to all its members; (b) The existence of dialects and jargons does not negate but confirms the existence of a language common to the whole of the given people, of which they are offshoots and to which they are subordinate; (c) The ‘class character’ of language formula is erroneous and nonMarxist. 41 Which means, on the other hand, that language falls outside of the dialectical process: The further development of production, the appearance of classes, the introduction of writing, the rise of the state, which needed a more or less well-regulated correspondence for its administration, the development of trade, which needed a well-regulated correspondence still more, the appearance of the printing press, the development of literature – all this caused big changes in the development of language. During this time, tribes and nationalities broke up and scattered, intermingled and intercrossed; later there arose national languages and states, revolutions took place, and old social systems were replaced by new ones. All this caused even greater changes in language and its development. However, it would be a profound mistake to think that language developed in the way the superstructure developed – by the destruction of that which existed and the building of something new. In point of fact, languages did not develop by the destruction of existing languages and the creation of new ones, but by extending and perfecting the basic elements of existing languages.42 The matter of linguistic change had yet again been misinterpreted by Marr and so, in a second Pravda article, Stalin denounced him for arguing that thought must ultimately dissociate itself from speech, evolving an abstract language, a future realm of pure concepts, the first examples of which would be demonstrated by ‘the latest inventions which are unreservedly conquering space’. 43 This is a corruption of Marx’s formulation that language is the immediate reality of thought, a material phenomenon, the natural matter of thought. Marr is thus an idealist.

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Language’s existence outside the base-superstructure dialectic actually lies in its identification with national materiality. Stalin is willing to forgo the dialectic, base and superstructure, so long as the natural matter of thought is preserved. Thus if Marr had erred in the higher reaches of Marxist thought he had, according to Stalin, nevertheless ‘conscientiously and, one must say, skillfully investigate[d] individual languages’. 44 Which, in the end, was not simply a redeeming feature mentioned in casual passage: the dangers Stalin was alert to in Marr’s Marxism were not merely theoretical – indeed, as the Chinese Communists saw in their own way, the national language is absolutely a matter of practical power and political control: exactly the sort of thing to be got right.

V The edition from which I have quoted Stalin’s linguistic theories was published in Peking, in 1972. It is a reprinting of the English language text published in Moscow in 1954: ‘Changes have been made according to other English translations.’45 The obvious question here is this: why should the Chinese Government be so keen to keep in circulation a foreign language edition of Stalin’s corrections of Marr’s misinterpretations of Marxist linguistics? The answer to that question can be found within the constraints of Chinese ‘speech reform’ and the political control of individual nationalities: the true matter at hand. In 1913, the new Chinese republic organised a conference on the unification of pronunciation at which it was decided to adopt Mandarin – educated Peking speech – as the national tongue. ‘This standard form of speech, which it was hoped would replace regional forms of speech as the medium of instruction and eventually in ordinary usage as well, was given the name Guóyu. This term is generally translated as “National Language”, a literal rendering of the two syllables, but it can also be rendered as “State Language” since guó can be translated as “state” as well as “nation”.’46 Thus, in 1927, one wing of the Guomindang saw Guóyu as the standard language of the entire state – that being the group deemed ethnically Chinese or related by blood to a single mínzú , variously translated as ‘ethnic group’, ‘nationality’, ‘nation’. This would include Mongols and Tibetans. On the other hand, the left argued that China was ‘made up of various nationality groups . . . which should be permitted education in [their] own language’.47 The term Mínzúyu – ‘national language’ – should therefore be replaced by Putonghuà – ‘Common Speech’ or ‘Common Language’ – as ‘an addition to, rather than a replacement of, other forms of


speech’ (italics added).48 Needless to say, upon actually getting power, the Communists had a severe change of heart: language policy among the ethnic minorities could continue but ‘toward the regionalects, however, [it] became almost identical with that of the ousted Guomindang regime’.49 It was highly fortuitous that Stalin published his thoughts in 1950 on linguistics, with their radical emphasis upon the essential ‘national’ characteristics of a language. The Chinese translation appeared a month after the publication of the Russian original. The new rulers of the PRC, struggling to survive in the face of international hostility, had no time to mess with pluralistic niceties of regionalects or – according to Wang Li – reactionary American linguists, like Bloomfield, who held that ‘the term “Chinese language” actually refer[red] to a . . . family made up of a great many varieties of mutually unintelligible languages’.50 To deny that the Chinese have a common language was tantamount to denying the fact that they constituted a common nation. The irony of all this is that while Wang Li saw Stalin brilliantly reworking Marxist orthodoxy to serve his own Chinese ends – namely the articulation of principles upon which uniform speech could be imposed – it appears that Stalin had the opposite end in view: namely, the legitimation of as many regionalects as possible in order to preserve the dominance of one central language – Russian. In ‘Stalin on Linguistics’, Ian Bedford argues that the Great Leader’s real problem was the large minority, within the Soviet Union, of Turkic speakers and the spectre of a pan-Turkic movement held together, on the one hand, by their hostility to Russian and, on the other, by the strength of their own mutually intelligible languages: The aim of . . . the pan-Turkic movement was to establish a standard literary language. The task did not seem [impossible]. One characteristic of Turkic languages has been widely remarked on, and is fundamental to any discussion of Soviet linguistic policy. The languages are ‘remarkably uniform’ . . . and slow to change. Only Chuvash (which so fascinated Marr) and Yakut, spoken in Siberia, are ‘aberrant’. Various classifications have been proposed and . . . real differences exist, but it is possible to speak of similarity and even of mutual intelligibility among languages spoken ‘in Adrianople, in the Turkish-speaking parts of Cyprus, in Chinese Turkestan [and in] Samarkand’ (Lewis 1977). If these differences were minimised (as they were in the programme of pan-Turkism) then it would appear credible to speak of Turkish (or some such name) as the second language of the Soviet Union. In a sense, so it is. But the danger was avoided. In Soviet usage and to all

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administrative intents and purposes, there is today no Turkish, but Uzbek, Turkmeni, Kirghiz, Kazakh and so on, the national and regional languages of the respective republics, autonomous republics, autonomous provinces (oblasti) and autonomous regions (okrugi). Each of the major languages is furnished with its separately devised alphabet, in cyrillic script since 1939–41 but unregularised with respect to all the others so that minor differences flourish to such a degree that ‘the languages look far more different from each other than in fact they are’. . . . In persevering through thick and thin with the concept of a national language, Stalin forged a redoubtable instrument of policy. If it were not for Stalin, Pushkin might still be read almost exclusively in his native tongue. He would never have become the most famous poet in the Uzbek language. 51 So much for Stalin’s rantings. Hence his rejection of whatever might actually have seemed essential to any Marxist account of linguistics: now the pragmatic relation between language and land is supreme, for only by reaffirming the plurality of languages, cultures and hence nations, could Stalin ensure that Russian – his borrowed tongue, the language of administration and control – made possible the continuous central domination of Moscow over its linguistic others and their fragmented ethnic groups.

VI The seminary student certainly knew the significance of Genesis: he was particularly aware that God was the first linguist: incomprehensibility is necessary to ensure worship – the survival of the One through confusing the many. The reductionist – the one God – understands the need for linguistic pluralism if He is to survive. Solzhenitsyn had direct experience of the megalomaniac cult of personality: guilty of blasphemy, he ‘was arrested and sentenced to eight years of forced labor for derogatory remarks about “the man with the moustache” made in a letter to a friend’.52 God knows all, sees all; the Great Linguist realised that language was a crucial area of political experience to be set in disorder. At the end of his treatise on linguistics Stalin wearily looks ahead to the ultimate merging of languages into one common language: . . . after the victory of socialism on a world scale, when world imperialism no longer exists; when the exploiting classes are overthrown and


national and colonial oppression is eradicated; when national isolation and mutual distrust among nations is replaced by mutual confidence and rapprochement between nations; when national equality has been put into practice; when the policy of suppressing and assimilating languages is abolished; when the co-operation of nations has been established, and it is possible for national languages freely to enrich one another through their co-operation. It is clear that in these conditions there can be no question of the suppression and defeat of some languages, and the victory of others. Here we shall have not two languages, one of which is to suffer defeat, while the other is to emerge from the struggle victorious, but hundreds of national languages, out of which, as a result of a prolonged economic, political and cultural co-operation of nations, there will first appear most enriched unified zonal languages, and subsequently the zonal languages will merge into a single international language, which, of course, will be neither German, nor Russian, nor English, but a new language that has absorbed the best elements of the national and zonal languages. 53 As knowing a lie as you could ask for: linguistic heaven. But of course, until then – Babel. God has spoken. He is the first linguist; the first linguist is God. Quite properly did Solzhenitsyn’s instincts lead him to portray the man with the moustache hunched over his manuscript as a lunatic, even if he radically underestimated what was going on while the Great Linguist’s mind devised a wonderland logic that, under the illusion of liberation, would continue to imprison his very own subjects. And so, while Saussure’s point about the significance of language and the linguist – In the lives of individuals and of societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs. In practice, the study of language is in some degree or other the concern of everyone. But a paradoxical consequence of this general interest is that no other subject has fostered more absurd notions, more prejudices, more illusions, or more fantasies. From a psychological point of view, these errors are of interest in themselves. But it is the primary task of the linguist to denounce them, and to eradicate them as completely as possible.54 – is relevant, it is even more important to realise that this warning carries in turn an ironically unrecognised judgement against itself. We

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mislead with assumptions of correctness lodged neatly within the smooth glove of intellectual custom: the history of courageous reactions against monotone normative discourses flatters self-deceptions. The idea that linguistic plurality must necessarily be a good thing is, as the case of Stalin shows, profoundly deceptive: there is no linguistic reassurance against the uncertainties of life. Unfortunately, being nice to others may be feelgood in an intellectually secular world but it can equally cover dobad in the real version: God or the Devil’s ways are infinite and cunning in their varieties. The ‘house-painter’s fallacy’ should warn us against the danger of becoming successful victims to our own propaganda. Orwell’s observation that totalitarianism promises ‘an age of schizophrenia’55 is overwhelmingly confirmed by Stalin’s essays. One thing is said in order to contradict itself – that is the logic of totalitarian schizophrenia: attempting to hoodwink entire peoples about the nature of their own languages might appear to be a truly grand act of folly; nonetheless it was, at the time, nothing if not grotesquely logical.

Notes I am extremely grateful to Christopher Hutton, of the Department of English, and to Grant Evans, of the Department of Sociology, at the University of Hong Kong, for their extreme generosity with advice and information concerning matters linguistic and anthropological. 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Norman Stone, Hitler (Boston and Toronto, 1980), p. xi. Robert Service, Times Literary Supplement, 15 November 1991, p. 14. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 600. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, translated by Thomas P. Whitney (New York and Evanston, 1968), pp. 97–8. Gisela Bruche-Schulz – in personal communication – informs me that Bulthaup, the editor of the translation of Stalin’s articles on linguistics into German, doubted his authorship and that V. Kiparsky, in ‘Comparative and Historical Slavistics’, Current Trends in Linguistics, edited by T. S. Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), p. 96, suggests that ‘Chikobava . . . initiated the “famous linguistic discussion”’. Kindly translated by G. Bruche-Schulz from her own book, Russische Sprachwissenschaft. Wissenschaft im historisch-politischen Prozess des vorsowjetischen und sowjetischen Russland (Tuebingen: Niemeyer, 1984), p. 133. A. B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (London, 1973), pp. 718–19. R. H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (London, 1989), p. 276. Deutscher, Stalin, p. 27. Ibid., p. 36. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler, pp. 6–7. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 8.

Stalin on Linguistics 187 12. Ibid., p. 10. 13. Robert Himmer, ‘On the Origin and Significance of the Name Stalin’, The Russian Review, vol. 45, 1986, p. 269. 14. Ibid., p. 270. 15. Ibid., pp. 270–1. 16. Ibid., p. 278. 17. Ibid., p. 284. 18. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, p. 46. 19. K. H. Phillips, Language Theories of the Early Soviet Period, vol. 10, Exeter Linguistic Studies (University of Exeter, 1986), pp. 69–71. 20. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, pp. 96–7. 21. Ibid., p. 31. 22. Phillips, Language Theories of the Early Soviet Period, p. 86. 23. Marina Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language; Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors, translated by Catherine Slater (London, 1991), p. 69. 24. Phillips, Language Theories of the Early Soviet Period, pp. 71–2. 25. Ibid., p. 76. 26. Ibid., pp. 78–9. 27. N. Y. Marr, On the Origins of Language (1926), quoted in Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language, pp. 174–5. 28. Yaguello, Lunatic Lovers of Language, p. 77. 29. J. V. Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (Peking, 1972), pp. 3–4. 30. Ibid., pp. 31–2. 31. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 32. Ibid., p. 9. 33. Ibid., pp. 9–10. 34. Ibid., p. 11. 35. Phillips, Language Theories of the Early Soviet Period, p. 84. 36. Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, p. 11. 37. Ibid., p. 12. 38. Ibid., p. 13. 39. Ibid., pp. 13–14. 40. Ibid., p. 18. 41. Ibid., p. 20. 42. Ibid., p. 25. 43. Ibid., p. 36. 44. Ibid., p. 39. 45. Ibid., Publisher’s Note. 46. John de Francis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (University of Hawaii Press, 1986), p. 224. 47. Ibid., p. 225. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., p. 226. 50. Ibid., p. 227. 51. Ian Bedford, ‘Stalin on Linguistics’, Canberra Anthropology, 8(1 and 2) Special Volume: Minorities and the State, 1985, pp. 78–80. 52. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, ‘About the Author’. 53. Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, pp. 51–2.

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54. F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, translated and annotated by Roy Harris (London, 1983), p. 7. 55. George Orwell, ‘The Prevention of Literature’, in Collected Essays (London, 1961), p. 334.

7 Oaths and Laughter and Indecent Speech*

I If all science on language stopped now, we would know very little about dirty word usage or how dirty word usage relates to more normal language use. Jay, 1992, p. 113 Sounds bad but, then again, what on earth is a ‘dirty word’? Hung about till dark – the seagulls as light failed nearly all floated instead of flying – then sailed at 7 . . . Now I’m in 2nd officer’s cabin with Capt. and Horton, the men outside laughing and joking and saying fucking. Thomas, 1917, p. 466

Edward Thomas on 29 January 1917: here we are caught within the war’s transformations and terminations, not least, perhaps linguistic. The poet/anthropologist takes note of the nervously casual language of men sailing the Channel towards the terror of trench warfare and a fair possibility of death: not least, it turns out, his own. Yet Edward Thomas in pre-war life had tramped throughout the English countryside so he could hardly have been ignorant of rural working class culture and its speech varieties. Ought we to infer from his observation that it was sufficiently out of the ordinary and worthy of record that ‘the men’ stood * Source: First appeared in Language and Communication, 13 (October 1993), pp. 311–25. 189

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about ‘saying fucking’? Or does the significance of his remark lie not simply in its historical notation (i.e. we learn that ‘the men’ swore heavily in 1917) but equally in the ear’s sharpness, its weird precision: ‘saying fucking’? Presumably Thomas’s point was that ‘the men’ were not, at one level, actually – effectively – swearing; rather, they were simply ‘saying’, using the word as a kind of meaningless particle. On the other hand, how meaningless? After all, this particular group – enlisted men – has collectively chosen, at some conscious level, this particular word rather than any other. An obvious explanation for such a choice might point out that the powerful ubiquity of ‘fuck/ing’ comes from its grammatical versatility: given that possibility what still remains to explain is, simply, what were they actually doing ‘laughing and joking and saying fucking’? And perhaps what they were doing, consciously or not, Edward Thomas suddenly realised, was confirming that the Romantic ideal (more than two centuries of it) not just of the individual (‘the men’) but also of language, perpetrated most significantly by Wordsworth, ‘the real language of men’ (Wordsworth, 1805, p. 18), in his actual poetic theory and supposed practice, was stony cold dead in that cheerless war-torn night. The irony is that Wordsworth’s own experience of not simply ‘the men’ but also ‘the women’, in another time, and under other circumstances, was of a kind with Edward Thomas’s – hence the need for his supreme fictions concerning the real selves and their real languages.

II William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade remarks that the first point to understand about Hollywood concerning the success or failure of any project is its utter unpredictability and thus formulates Law 1 of the place and its business: ‘Nobody knows anything’ (Goldman, 1983, p. 39) – which might just as well stand for any attempt to understand swearing. There is no end of description and history on the matter but the reality of a cogent explanation is elusive. To begin at the beginning: how do I even know I’m swearing? When Caliban famously curses Prospero for giving him the power to curse – You taught me language; and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language! Shakespeare, 1623, I.11.365–7

Oaths and Laughter and Indecent Speech

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– Shakespeare raised more questions than he settled. Of course cursing and swearing may be different but they are arguably in some instances of a kind. The men ‘saying fucking’ are not cursing each other but are presumably bonding in unity through the linguistic act against, among other things, their general situation: there is a unity in cursing, say, the whole fucking war. Certainly the word will stand for a curse as in ‘Fuck you’. The problem, of course, with Caliban is that he casts doubts on the whole image of Prospero as the sage: we know the old man can be short-tempered but what precisely was the nature of his teaching? Kermode in The Arden Shakespeare, on this point, remarks that ‘Caliban’s education was not only useless – on his nature, which is nature tout court, nurture would never stick – but harmful. He can only abuse the gift of speech . . . ’ (Shakespeare, 1623, p. xlvi). But the problem is that the power to curse surely exists within some other dimension than that of inutility: indeed how is it ‘useless’ to be able to curse and in what way is that an ‘abuse’ of speech? Caliban’s curse is obviously a curse at an introduction which – he claims – he wishes he had never received. So while Prospero struggles to protect Miranda from Caliban’s worldview, he is nevertheless solely responsible for teaching that world-view to articulate itself. Thus Caliban’s angry thought that knowing how to curse merely enables him to curse the person who taught him how to curse (in which case Kermode’s ‘useless’ is better understood as ‘futile’), is actually a contradiction: for if that is what he has learned then that is not the only thing he has learned; it may be his ‘profit’ or progress true but that very statement is an act of self-conscious analysis which sets him up as a thinker: ‘You taught me language.’ He has learned that he has learned it. And that raises the further question: is he uttering a general truth – should ‘ordinary’ people experience fear and loathing at learning how to swear and curse: is Caliban leading us towards some terrible self-knowledge? Part of the problem here may be that Caliban is claiming that he has no fun with language: that is, his linguistic philosophy has no sense here of the comic aspect of swearing: I’th’isle of Britain, long since famous grown For breeding the best cunts in Christendom, There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive, The easiest king and best-bred man alive. Him no ambition moves to get renown Like the French fool, that wanders up and down Starving his people, hazarding his crown.

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Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such, And love he loves, for he loves fucking much. Rochester, 1697, p. 60 This is John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘A Satyr on Charles II’, written shortly before 20 January 1674: the coming century was to see the demise of such obscene comedy. The joke’s extra joke – Rochester unfortunately handed the manuscript over to the King thinking it was another poem: he ‘fled from Court’ (Rochester, 1697, p. 60) – confirms the linguistic lèse-majesté, true, but equally suggests a linguistic confidence, an openness, which only reappears in polite poetic company 300 years later. And then its presence somewhat sourly retains none of the comic brio of Rochester’s usage – he is after all being literal with his ‘fuck’ – but is in its aggressive metaphorical guise, post-trenches and Edward Thomas: This Be The Verse They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. Larkin, 1988, p. 180 Larkin’s famous curse upon procreation ingeniously demands the use of the swear-word. It works: but is part of its working related to his own public position as university librarian? From a statistical table on the ‘Mean Likelihood of Using Dirty Words for Various [American] Campus Occupations’ ( Jay, 1992, p. 89) we find, not surprisingly, that the athletic coach comes top on a scale of likelihood 0–100 with 82.50 while the male librarian features not at all. This may be revealing about Larkin or American male librarians or both or even female librarians, given that their score was 7.87. Male teachers, incidentally, at 44.50 were ahead of the mail carrier at 37.50. Does, then, Larkin’s own career as librarian enforce the impact of his own expletive? That may be relevant and we may have some explanation for its effect but only up to a point. We could rewrite the line They screw you up but the force is immediately diminished, and certainly further substitution seems to be completely counter-productive, e.g. they bugger you up.


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The simple solution of course is to go back to Adam and ask him why he chose the word ‘fuck’ to have just the power and versatility it seems to enjoy only, however, at certain moments in our linguistic development. For it is equally the case that ‘the first wide-spread use of fuck as an expletive [in the United States of America] began by the late 1800s’ ( Jay, 1992, p. 76). Why not before? Why not later? Thus there are two problems to consider: first there is the obvious point of understanding the nature of taboo within terms of linguistic decorum. Rochester’s inventive poetry would fade from favour and its kind, in the public domain, did not return until late in our century. Why then do certain constraints appear and disappear? Larkin’s line works on a very fine margin; it still has its resonance within the context of – say – being published by an important publisher of important poets; but equally it can only work if the important publisher reckons the time is right for the public to be allowed to read a line like ‘They fuck you up . . . ’ It is certainly obvious now that we live, to an extent, in a pluralistic society – up to a point – covering linguistic usage. Here one need only mention essays by Davis (1989) and Harris (1990) on the way in which the now infamous swearing by the umpire at the English captain, Gatting, during the Faisalabad Test Match between England and Pakistan, was variously reported and unreported in the public press. So the matter of a taboo is indeed confusing not merely in that it exists but equally in that it may vanish. Thus the dictionary on the programme on which this sentence is written does not know ‘fuck’ at all. It seems in one sense arguable therefore that if linguistic taboo is a category of the mind, it is a protean one which allows itself – so far as language is concerned – to appear and reappear and reidentify itself constantly. This may or may not be a problem; it can perhaps be important at least – if we ignore poor Caliban’s dilemma – to sustain the comic vision: the idea of the right word at the wrong time demands some kind of constraint. On the other hand we would be caught up within an interesting new linguistic game if the idea of swearing were to disappear completely. Harris (1990) has pondered this, leaving us with the question whether it is possible to operate without the power to shock and offend verbally. And that is of course merely to refer in shorthand to different linguistic acts, e.g. writing and speech. Written obscenities may have a completely different form and force from those spoken. And those spoken may have different lives according to their contexts. Context, in one sense, may be all in describing the power of the offensive word. But that has got us no nearer as to why any particular

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word has the power it does. Which raises the second obvious problem: why is one word considered offensive and another not? This is not a plea for an etymological explanation but rather a simple question as to how it is that some sound is deemed to have power that another doesn’t. This is a matter entirely internal to language for we are not referring to acts which are taboo, nor to the idea of such an act that cannot be referred to (because of course there can be no act to which reference cannot be made), but to the matter that somehow an arbitrary sound seems to have a life with resonance far beyond its appearance. Why does ‘fuck’ have such power in Larkin’s poem? By what bizarre evolutionary twist have English-speaking humans evolved a sense that this will work in a way which – say – ‘pork’ will not. ‘Pork’ presumably exists because of its phonetic similarity to ‘fuck’ but equally proves by its dissimilarity that somehow the right word – in this language – begins with f: for some reason. For what is the onomatopoeic quality of that letter?

III Perhaps the root of this problem is that Shakespeare got one part of it dead right: it has something to do with learning. Swearing is an acquired skill: so how do we learn? Who teaches us? Or rather who does not? Jay makes the following assertion in support of his contention that ‘there is a great deal of swearing in [American] society and as a behavior it occurs commonly with other highly frequent behavior such as being drunk, spitting, farting, sticking out the tongue, and wearing revealing clothing’. Age of [word] acquisition is generally a good indicator of the importance of linguistic concepts and of frequency of usage. Words that are learned early are used frequently. The durability of language when threatened by old age, brain damage, or other insults to the brain, is another line of support. High frequency words and important concepts, e.g., those learned in childhood are the last to disappear during traumatic decline. Dirty words are both learned early and remain late . . . Jay, 1992, pp. 155–6 Perhaps, but on the other hand who remembers when they first learned to swear (a) as a child and (b) as a child/adult, which cannot be at the age of one or two but presumably at some crucial point in adolescence?


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Moreover, taking a word like ‘fuck’, at what point was the word learned as the exclamation undirected at or unfocused on the explicit sexual act, that is to say, the utterance of anger, aggression, irritation, contempt or whatever: (‘Fuck you; this is a fuck-up’) and when is it learned as an utterance which has a specific and exact semantic content which may or may not be used within the exclamation’s point: ‘Oh go fuck yourself’, suggesting a grotesque act of the self invading its own body in an act of indignity worthy of such a contemptible person? It may well be that this is a crucial moment – a rite of passage – which like other crucial moments – when did we first grasp that we would die? – is lost. If it is lost why? And this seems to be an unanswerable question. Is our initiation into this linguistic reality perceived as a loss of linguistic innocence (or seen to be so in our social structures) which is simultaneously repressed and so repressed because of the human fear of sexuality; or is it, in fact, a liberation from childhood into the full richness of complete adulthood? Larkin suggests what is won and lost in this exchange: It was that verse about becoming again as a little child that caused the first sharp waning of my Christian sympathies. If the Kingdom of Heaven could be entered only by those fulfilling such a condition I knew I should be unhappy there. It was not the prospect of being deprived of money, keys, wallet, letters, books, long-playing records, drinks, the opposite sex, and other solaces of adulthood that upset me (I should have been about eleven), but having to put up indefinitely with the company of other children, their noise, their nastiness, their boasting, their back-answers, their cruelty, their silliness. Until I began to meet grown-ups on more or less equal terms I fancied myself a kind of Ishmael. The realization that it was not people I disliked but children was for me one of those celebrated moments of revelation . . . The knowledge that I should never (except by deliberate act of folly) get mixed up with them again more than compensated for having to start earning a living. Larkin, 1983, p. 111 This vision of the truth about children – ‘their cruelty, their silliness’ – is worth consideration when thinking about the nature of ‘bad language’. Is the adult use of the mot sale actually recalling a moment of childish rebellion, an act of innocent inversion: recreating linguistic liberation within childhood as an anticipation of entry into the glamour of adult life: ‘money, keys, wallet, letters, books, long-playing records,

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drinks, the opposite sex . . . ’, bad language; naughty laughter? The act of swearing carries then this double identity: it is, in the case of the child, the presumption to the assumption of adulthood and, in the case of the adult, the momentary assumption again of being that child pretending to adulthood. Certainly it is a complex act revolving round innocence and experience: Lawrence attempted to understand this in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: ‘Nay,’ he said, ‘tha canna do’t. When sholt come then?’ ‘’Appen Sunday,’ she said. ‘’Appen a’ Sunday! Ay!’ He laughed at her quickly. ‘Nay, tha canna,’ he protested. ‘Why canna I?’ she said. He laughed. Her attempts at the dialect were so ludicrous, somehow. ‘Coom then, tha mun goo!’ he said. ‘Mun I?’ she said. ‘Maun Ah!’ he corrected. ‘Why should I say maun when you said mun?’ she protested. ‘You’re not playing fair.’ ‘Arena Ah!’ he said, leaning forward and softly stroking her face. ‘Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit o’ cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When th’art willin’!’ ‘What is cunt?’ she said. ‘An’ doesn’t ter know? Cunt! It’s thee down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee, and what tha gets when I’m i’side thee; it’s a’ as it is, all on’t.’ ‘All on’t,’ she teased. ‘Cunt! It’s like fuck then.’ ‘Nay nay! Fuck’s only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see: an’ tha’rt a lot besides an animal, aren’t ter? – even ter fuck? Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’thee, lass!’ She got up and kissed him between the eyes, that looked at her so dark and soft and unspeakably warm, so unbearably beautiful. ‘Is it?’ she said. ‘And do you care for me?’ He kissed her without answering. Lawrence, 1928, pp. 184–5 Mr Griffith-Jones presenting the prosecution’s case against Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in Regina v. Penguin Books, asserted that Lawrence’s novel ‘encourages, and indeed advocates, coarseness and vulgarity of thought and of language’. Of course, the speech went famously on:


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‘You may think that one of the ways in which you can test this book, and test it from the most liberal outlook, is to ask yourselves the question, when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book. Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ This last question had a visible – and risible – effect on the jury, and may well have been the first nail in the prosecution’s coffin. Rolph, 1961, p. 17 This is October 1960 – and we assume another world. And yet for all Mr Griffith-Jones’ hopeless incorrectness – ‘girls can read as well as boys’; ‘even wish your wife’ (husbands in loco parentis); ‘servants’ – for all the obvious risibility he is nevertheless thrashing about within some sort of genuine problem, a problem, moreover, whose existence the defence was actually prepared to concede, for obvious reasons. ‘The attitude of shame – let us face it – which very large numbers of people have towards sex in any form has reduced us now, you may think, to this position: that it is not at all easy for mothers and fathers to find words to describe that which, most properly, they want to describe to their children, and this author in a book in which there is no kind of perversion at all evidently thought that in using some words to describe physical union, words which have been part of our spoken speech for 500 or 600 years, [‘The first cited instance in the OEDS of cunt occurs in a London streetname with the enticing (or monitory) appellation Gropecuntlane, dated 1230. Such public evidence, alongside the ubiquitous Pissing Alley and Shitteborwelane, a London street name of 1272, suggests that cunt must have been a publicly acceptable term.’ (Hughes, 1991, p. 20)] he would purify them from the shame which was placed upon them. He thought that anyone reading it would be shocked the first time, but that by repetition they would realize there was nothing shameful in a word in itself. It depends so much upon the mind that is being applied to it . . . [W]hether Lawrence succeeded or not in his attempt to purify these particular words by bringing them out into the light of day does not matter, because there is nothing in words themselves which can deprave or corrupt. Rolph, 1961, pp. 34–5

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Of course the defence is right; it is only a word, an inexplicable mystery of sound. But equally the defence’s point is trivial: the whole point about words is that – nonetheless, despite our philosophically accepting the absurdity of our condition – people can and do believe that words are able, in and of themselves, to corrupt. Indeed, the defence wants to have it both ways for why else should it argue that Lawrence is attempting to ‘purify these particular words’ unless it somehow perceives that Lawrence perceived that these very same words were being misused to deprave and corrupt? It is clear then, on reflection, that the stumbling prosecution is ironically engaged with the actual conditions of language and mind in a much more helpful way: at the heart of the whole affair is indeed the matter of purity and innocence. Mellors introduces Connie to words which are indeed commonly understood to be ‘coarse and vulgar’. If we extend the logic of the prosecution we understand that it is tangled up within the very question of what we can understand about the child’s notion of swearing. For Connie is in a false position in that she is aware of the sexual act before she is aware of the words. And that, of course, is why in one sense literary critics in defending the book were able to point to its purity: for example, Richard Hoggart: Fifty yards from this Court this morning I heard a man say ‘fuck’ three times as he passed me. He was speaking to himself and he said ‘fuck it, fuck it, fuck it’ as he went past . . . The man I heard this morning . . . [used] the words as words of contempt, and one of the things Lawrence found most worrying was that the word for this important relationship had become a word of vile abuse. So one would say ‘fuck you’ to a man, although the thing has totally lost its meaning; it has become simply derision, and in this sense he wanted to re-establish the meaning of it, the proper use of it. Rolph, 1961, p. 98 Quixotic stuff; for the proper use of ‘fuck you’ is indeed derision. That Lawrence was toiling with some kind of Platonic grand scheme to purify the dialect of the tribe is to perceive the madness of his genius. To repeat: the whole scene with Connie is charming and touching in so far as the order of true experience is backwards. It renders her example as self-defeatingly unique. The real problem is that, as children, we are made aware of the concept ‘taboo’ within language without having any understanding of what the actual words mean: we have the language experience before we have the physical/emotional experience. And it is


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within this desecration of presumed innocence that we all live and many actually want fretfully to escape: One of D. H. Lawrence’s follies was to believe that he could rescue the f-word and its ilk from scrums and barrack-rooms. The folly lies in supposing that the f-word ever was used in some shameless and beautiful way. Not so, if the OED is right. There is no redemption of the word. It has never had anything to do with elegance, tenderness or carnal simplicity. Women tend to be more sensitive to this than men: my wife, who finds the f-word quite literally unspeakable, told me that she had always understood it as the expression ‘a rapist would use’. Spivey, The Spectator, 20 June 1992, p. 20 A gloomy view of life indeed. A view based, we discover, on the belief that the use of the ‘f-word’ (the author’s wife living within that highly complex twilight world of linguistic innocence denying experience) is ‘an essentially juvenile speech act, and journalists who need such speech acts for good copy are succumbing to childishness’ (Spivey, op. cit., p. 19). Of course, the Ghost of Gatting lies behind these meditations: it is an odd view of life, however, that allows a grown man to accuse a newspaper of being childish for fulfilling its adult function in reporting the news. Spivey’s confusion lies in the fact that he has dimly perceived something of real importance: the act of swearing may well have something profound to do with being ‘childish’; for the real target of interest should not be The Independent (for printing the words ‘fucking’ and ‘cunt’) but the umpire for saying them. It is exactly a juvenile act; the act of reinforcing the paradox of innocent precognition: ignorant knowing. It is an act which recalls a moment – we do not recall how long it lasts – weeks; months; years – when the child conspires with adulthood without actually being within it. It is thus a strangely unliberating liberation, for the full effect of the linguistic act is not to be changed by the experience itself. Hence Lawrence’s curiously naïve excursion. The anxiety about children in the Lady Chatterley case and indeed in all observations about swearing is thus simply one aspect of a hugely complex area of the psychic arena. Spivey’s wife’s inability to handle the ‘f-word’ may well be due to some kind of adolescent linguistic trauma, that of discovering a whole discourse – that of the real world – which she might be quite unable first to understand and then, worse, to control. If we abstract from the particular human being in question, it

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may well be the case that linguistically precocious adolescent girls from nice homes, avid readers ( pace Mr Griffith-Jones: he should have said ‘especially girls’), reach a position in which, advanced beyond the male cohort, sublimely superior in assuming that the world, as it appears, is manipulable linguistically, discover suddenly (no!) that there is the relentless anarchy of vulgar verbal life, real life. Betrayal: words fly about directly expressing attitudes and emotions – derision, anger, hostility, camaraderie etc – which should properly denote, in their primary meanings, the most intimate facts of a biological existence with which they must come to terms. Traumatic indeed – unless it can be grown through.

IV This would then account for the cultural shift against bad language which is coincidental with the rise of Romanticism. The cult of the child must be inextricable from the cult of proper discourse or the illusion of it. Which is to say, the repression of deviant or bad language: The beginning of the period of pre-Victorian prudery is hard to date – as are most developments in language . . . one can only say that fastidiousness in language becomes increasingly common from about 1750, and that this trend accelerated around the turn of the century . . . Rawson, 1981, p. 6; Hughes, 1991, p. 151 If Dictionary Johnson can be seen as one important point of departure for this development, Wordsworth (ironically given his strictures on Johnson’s repressive use of language in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads) must be seen as the key figure in ensuring its successful – triumphant – continuation. Historically central as a figure uniting Augustan England (born 1770); his own ‘revolutionary’ early writing seemingly accelerating its demise to suggest that new dawn – Romanticism (first edition Lyrical Ballads, 1798; first two parts of The Prelude, 1799; first ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, 1800; first version of The Prelude, 1805) he lived on, of course, to transmute into the central literary conscience of early Victorianism – dying in 1850. Wordsworth’s significance in this matter is complex: on the one hand, he managed to mislead himself and us about the role his revolutionary approach to language would entail: in the ‘Advertisement’ for Lyrical Ballads he comes out with it straight: ‘The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to


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the purposes of poetic pleasure’ (Wordsworth, 1798, p. 116). But of course, on the other hand, the poems that follow are nothing of the sort, as Coleridge in Biographica Literaria was to point out: Wordsworth’s language is that which has been tempered by the accidental influence – for example – of the rustic pulpit or village school; if it were not the result would have been, no doubt, unprintable. Thus Wordsworth’s exemplification of the language of ‘[l]ow and rustic life’ (Wordsworth, 1805, p. 21), a selection of the ‘very language of men’ (Wordsworth, 1805, p. 26), is a self-deception. Setting aside Coleridge’s primary objection that there is no such thing as a single natural real language – ‘Anterior to cultivation, the lingua communis of every country, as Dante has well observed, exists everywhere in parts, and no where as a whole’ (Coleridge, 1817, p. 209) – the obvious point, as he notes, is that Wordsworth is actually justifying an impoverishment of language: As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is formed. For first, if to communicate with an object implies such an acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately reflected on; the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things, and modes of action, requisite for his bodily conveniences, would alone be individualized; while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of confused general terms. Coleridge, 1817, p. 207 And yet, even today, the attempt is still being made to buy into Wordsworth’s fantasy on this matter: Wordsworth emphasized a number of things in the Preface and the 1802 Appendix to it. But looking closely at this text shows us that it is not, in fact, the notorious emphasis on the language of ‘humble and rustic’ life that is most important. This emphasis and the resulting argument with Coleridge about it hardly seem the real issue. Wordsworth himself of course did not stick to such language, not even throughout the ballads let alone in the later great periods. Rather it is the ‘reality’ of the language of men that is constantly repeated. Ward, 1984, p. 4 One way of saving an untenable position is to turn it into no position at all. The ‘reality’ of the language of men is at best tautology and

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meaningless: real language is real; or merely empty assertion: my language is really real – unlike yours. In fact, it is indeed the latter which Wordsworth is guilty of asserting; his revolution, however, is profoundly reactionary – which of course makes it no less revolutionary: Wordsworth’s ‘language really used by men’ (Wordsworth, 1805, p. 21) is based on his fear of what was really evolving as ‘real’ language, namely the discourse of the modern city: For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupation produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. Wordsworth, 1805, p. 25 These familiar words have their obvious historical resonance, nevertheless they are important as the context within which to place Wordsworth’s profound psychic reaction – and its influence – to the new age in which he found himself. If we accept the fact that the whole theory behind the practice of Lyrical Ballads is in fact riddled with contradictions, we are aware that Wordsworth was, of course, prescriptively excluding the really real language of real men: urbanity now means something quite the opposite; something fearful. But the fear seems to be a fear of that which, in prose, Wordsworth can only get at allusively. His talk of a public consuming ‘frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse’ (Wordsworth, 1805, p. 25) seems, on reflection, to be a random denunciation of what we could only understand to be coterie culture: are the newly accumulating masses – these stupified masses – returning from the factory to seek light relief from the monotony of their toil with the latest sickly German tragedy? The fact is that this passage has a dimension of hysteria to it, one which, on turning deeper into Wordsworth’s psyche, we discover to have a genuine cause.

V In The Prelude, the confession which he could not publish in his own lifetime, Wordsworth had to come to grips with the great city – London.


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Book VII is rightly famous for its extraordinary descriptive power; its passages which respond with an openess to the experience of seething London life seem to be the work of a man quite other than the author of the ‘Preface’: Now homeward through the thickening hubbub, where See – among less distinguishable shapes – The Italian, with his frame of images Upon his head; with basket at his waist, The Jew; the stately and slow-moving Turk, With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm. Briefly, we find (if tired of random sights, And haply to that search our thoughts should turn) Among the crowd, conspicuous less or more As we proceed, all specimens of man Through all the colours which the sun bestows, And every character of form and face: The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south, The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote America, the hunter Indian; Moors, Malays, Lascars, the Tartar and Chinese, And Negro ladies in white muslin gowns. 1805, ll. 227–43 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 238 We are the centre of the world; and if – as the editors point out – ‘hubbub’ recalls Milton’s Chaos in Paradise Lost, it is with the sense that, for the moment, this is more fun than the other. We are all fallen in our styles, after our own fashion: all of the human race is within this great microcosm. In this astonishing environment, the poet’s controlling metonym is of ‘exhibitions’ and ‘pantomimes’: it’s a show, an entertainment and thus, within the entertainment, Wordsworth describes his trips to ‘halfrural Sadler’s Wells’ where, ‘amid the uproar of the rabblement’, he took in the full variety of entertainers performing their feats. But at this point in the seemingly random account of random events, a narrative begins to take shape albeit obliquely. In April–June 1803, one of the entertainments staged at Sadler’s Wells was a melodrama in rhyme – Edward and Susan, or The Beauty of Buttermere. The play’s story was based on the true case of one Mary Robinson who was seduced into a bigamous marriage by a certain John Hatfield who, in his turn, was later hanged for forgery. Now Wordsworth

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and Coleridge had met Mary Robinson on 11 November 1799, on their walking south from Scotland and they were to pass by – in September 1803 – the very spot on which the forger and bigamist had been hanged. Writing Book VII of The Prelude in November 1804 (Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 519) about London and his own earlier attendance at the same theatre some time in the 1790s, he finds himself guiltily caught up within a complicity he cannot purge – or perhaps can only purge by so (secretly) writing – as he thinks of the daring brotherhood of actors performing (making public) this sad tale. A strange guilt indeed, for Wordsworth ‘not only did not see [the play] in the 1790s but may not in fact have seen [it] later’ ( Jacobus, 1989, fn. 11, p. 209): – too holy theme for such a place, And doubtless treated with irreverance, Albeit with their very best of skill – I mean, O distant friend, a story drawn From our own ground, the Maid of Buttermere, And how the spoiler came, ‘a bold, bad man’ To God unfaithful, children, wife, and home, And wooed the artless daughter of the hills, And wedded her, in cruel mockery Of love and marriage bonds. O friend, I speak With tender recollection of that time When first we saw the maiden, then a name By us unheard of – in her cottage-inn Were welcomed, and attended on by her, Both stricken with one feeling of delight, An admiration of her modest mien And carriage, marked by unexampled grace. 1805, ll. 318–34 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, pp. 242, 244 The name of Mary Robinson – ‘then a name/By us unheard of’ – has to be saved, taken out of the theatre – ‘too holy theme for such a place’ – and brought back to ‘our own ground’. This linguistic cleansing – Wordsworth now attributing complicity within his own confession even at the thought of having enjoyed himself within this unholy place – gives the poet a Christ-like power over language. But even as he expunges her notoriety, making her again into a private person, obliterating the theatrical representation


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Her patience, and retiredness of mind Unsoiled by commendation and excess Of public notice . . . 1805, ll. 338–40 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 244 he simultaneously seeks unconsciously to bury her linguistically: This memorial verse Comes from the poet’s heart, and is her due; For we were nursed – as almost might be said – On the same mountains, children at one time, Must haply often on the self-same day Have from our several dwellings gone abroad To gather daffodils on Coker’s stream. 1805, ll. 340–6 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 244: emphasis added So: the return to childhood takes language away from the city, from the actors, from the public, back into the private, the retrogressive innermost innocence ‘to gather daffodils’. Her past – tainted with London’s theatrical associations – is buried. But that is by no means the end of the story: indeed it is an incident which lets Wordsworth loose into a session of self-analysis that will not cease until we reach the discovery of the linguistic trauma that lies behind his polemic of the ‘Preface’: Mary Robinson will not go away. Buried, she rises from his memory and this time an even more bizarre resolution is enacted: . . . to my argument I was returning, when – with sundry forms Mingled, that in the way which I must tread Before me stand – thy image rose again, Mary of Buttermere! She lives in peace Upon the spot where she was born and reared; Without contamination does she live In quietness, without anxiety. Beside the mountain chapel sleeps in earth Her new-born infant, fearless as a lamb That thither comes from some unsheltered place To rest beneath the little rock-like pile

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When storms are blowing. Happy are they both, Mother and child! 1805, ll. 347–60 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 244 Of these lines, the editors remark that ‘[t]here are no records of Mary’s having had a child by Hatfield, but Wordsworth presumably had local knowledge’ (Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 244) – a piece of speculation that, of course, cannot be gainsaid. Equally, the temptation to read here the poet’s own guilt – if guilt there be – at the thought of his own illegitimate child, Anne-Caroline, by Annette Vallon, twelve years old at the time of Book VII’s composition, is difficult to resist. Even so the hope that this entombment – the image of the child asleep in the earth (a hope which must have come back to haunt him: his own daughter Catharine was to die in her fourth year – 1812) – will lay this to rest is a delusion for now the focus of his anxiety begins to harden: the dead infant leads his memory irresistably to a living child and we spiral down again into theatre. There is no escape; Wordsworth is tormented by the idea of doomed innocence . . . those ingenuous moments of our youth Ere yet by use we have learnt to slight the crimes And sorrows of the world. 1805, ll. 362–4 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 244 The particular instance of this moment in life – what we are beginning to realise Wordsworth himself understands to be the key moment in the development of consciousness – is exemplified by the recollection of A rosy babe, who for a twelvemonth’s space Perhaps had been of age to deal about Articulate prattle . . . 1805, ll. 368–70 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 244 In the 1850 version this is shortened to ‘six months’ space’ as if to insist upon the premature tragedy of entry into reality, of the fall into language. For it becomes evident that this child is both innocent and presumably damned: upon his mother’s ‘cheek the tints were false’ (1805, l. 373, Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 246). The child can speak even if


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only as a child, nonetheless he is equally already inescapably trapped within the known knowing adult world. Of course he is not yet aware of the prostitute’s stain the poet sees so clearly. And there he sate environed with a ring Of chance spectators, chiefly dissolute men And shameless women – treated and caressed – Ate, drank, and with the fruit and glasses played, While oaths, indecent speech, and ribaldry Were rife about him as are songs of birds In springtime after showers. 1805, ll. 386–92 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850 p. 246 In the 1850 version, the key words in the crucial line, the epicentre of the whole complex of experience and analysis, are rearranged: While oaths and laughter and indecent speech 1850, l. 363 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 247 so that there can be no doubt as to what appalls the fascinated onlooker: he is observing the condition within which the innocent beautiful child – ‘in face a cottage rose’ (1805, l. 380; Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 246) – is learning to swear. Not consciously, for clearly it is not a conscious choice: within the city, within the theatre – even one like ‘half-rural’ Sadler’s Wells – there is no control over the linguistic environment. The child sits amidst ‘chance spectators’. That is the psychic dread behind the bizarre theories of language advanced by ‘The Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads: the language of cities cannot be controlled. And so Wordsworth deliberately confesses to denying the future that haunts him as he thinks of what must be the inevitable denouement to the apparently trivial incident he has observed: He hath since Appeared to me ofttimes as if embalmed By Nature – through some special privilege Stopped at the growth he had – destined to live, To be, to have been, come, and go, a child And nothing more, no partner in the years That bear us forward to distress and guilt,

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Pain and abasement; beauty in such excess Adorned him in that miserable place. 1805, ll. 399–407 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 246 So terrible then is the power of ‘indecent speech’: better that again – ‘embalmed’ – the child be suspended, inanimate, dead, than that it should grow through the language of real men. So powerful is the sense of this linguistic power to corrupt that Wordsworth imagines the child when grown turning to the real dead child – if real it be – Mary Robinson’s child and envying its fate: So have I thought of him a thousand times – And seldom otherwise – but he perhaps, Mary, may now have lived till he could look With envy on thy nameless babe that sleeps Beside the mountain chapel undisturbed. 1805, ll. 408–12 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 246 This profoundly irrational – pathological – response to the ‘f-word’ experience, to the real world of real language, of course like all such responses, entails Wordsworth’s own complicity in knowing what the ‘f-word’ actually means. His reaction to the incident of the Sadler’s Wells child – to all of the incidents he has recalled – by memorialising, burying and embalming, suggests that the consciousness of swearing may well be the most important single linguistic moment in a human being’s development. For, finally, Wordsworth reveals the cause of his own reaction to the ‘indecent speech’ episode by confessing to his own traumatisation at the age of seventeen and thus – we must assume – still sexually innocent (he met Annette Vallon in 1792, that is when he was twenty-two)— When first, a traveller from our pastoral hills, Southward two hundred miles I had advanced, And for the first time in my life did hear The voice of woman utter blasphemy – Saw woman as she is to open shame Abandoned, and the pride of public vice. 1805, ll. 415–20 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 248


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The lines subsequent to the word ‘blasphemy’ suggest that Wordsworth was traumatised not merely by her speaking profanely of the sacred but by the profane itself: the intimations of sexuality are apparent (‘public vice’) and it seems clear that he has brought himself – heroically – to the edge of final analysis (if such there be) and then turned away from it. That he was profoundly affected by this moment is acknowledged: Full surely from the bottom of my heart I shuddered; but the pain was almost lost, Absorbed and buried in the immensity Of the effect: a barrier seemed at once Thrown in, that from humanity divorced The human form, splitting the race of man In twain, yet leaving the same outward shape. 1805, ll. 421–7 Wordsworth, 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 248 But the acknowledgement raises many questions even as it attempts to heal the wound: on which side is he of the twain; the recurrent question of the guilt of complicity, of knowing, is acknowledged and equally avoided. The excommunication of the swearing female is the final act of repression following confession in the whole passage: the ‘pain was almost . . . / . . . buried in the immensity / of the effect’. The various meditations from the theatre have all led to this one moment: a moment when the act of swearing, the revelation of the profane – the real language of women – traumatises the adolescent. It would not then be fantastical to perceive that his whole theory of language is a function of this one moment. What Wordsworth reveals then is how profound a moment, a subject, the matter of swearing is. Lawrence thought he could redeem the language and its betrayers by re-enacting Genesis and having Adam introduce Eve to his world: ‘and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof’ (Genesis 2:19); making the profane sacred. And yet Lawrence, for all his ‘right-thinking’, is trapped within the same morbid condition as Wordsworth. In one of his more irritable outbursts, he implicitly attempted, once again, to come to grips with the traditional matter of bad language, the ‘twain’ which Wordsworth suddenly saw – the mind confronting the profanity of the body: But with the Elizabethans the grand rupture had started in the human consciousness, the mental consciousness recoiling in violence away

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from the physical, instinctive-intuitive. To the Restoration dramatist sex is, on the whole, a dirty business, but they more or less glory in the dirt. Fielding tries in vain to defend the Old Adam. Richardson with his calico purity and his underclothing excitements sweeps all before him. Swift goes mad with sex and excremental revulsion. Sterne flings a bit of the same excrement humorously around. And physical consciousness gives a last song in Burns, then is dead. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brontes, are all post-mortem poets. The essential instinctive-intuitive body is dead, and worshipped in death – all very unhealthy. Lawrence, 1929, p. 552 Wordsworth: the ‘post-mortem’ poet – this is true and yet it also fails to acknowledge that Wordsworth himself describes the moment of his own linguistic contamination; the moment when he was so profoundly shocked by words that he saw mankind as hideously split: the sinner and the knowing observer. To say then that his own subsequent use of words was an attempt to redeem a world corrupted by the bad language of ‘London’ is to prescribe the Romantic poet’s earthly mission: But most thro’ midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot’s curse Blasts the newborn Infant’s tear, And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. ll. 13–16 Blake, 1789–94, p. 216 This constant Romantic association of bad language with the destruction of innocence, with the cult of the child and the fallen woman – which comes first: the harlot or the curse? the word or the disease? – is the cause then of subsequent generations’ attempts to create a proper real language. From Wordsworth on – even through protesting Lawrence – the struggle with the fear of the foul word’s power to hurt the child within each self is at the core of all the various attempts at linguistic repression. There may, of course, ultimately be the necessary place for something which we can call, for want of anything better, linguistic decorum – you don’t call the captain of England a ‘fucking cheating cunt’ (at least not to his face on the field) and expect to retain the players’ respect as an umpire – but that acknowledges nothing more than the necessity of pragmatism before the absolute power of language. Perforce, its mysteries cannot be analysed at even the most superficial


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level until the profit of Caliban’s curse is understood to be the beginning – and perhaps end – of any serious attempt to comprehend the human psyche: that much Wordsworth realised even as he set about from the moment of schizophrenic recognition to deny it.

References Blake, W. (1789–94) Songs of Innocence and Experience. In G. Keynes (ed.), Complete Writings (Oxford University Press, London, 1972). Coleridge, S. T. (1817) Biographia Literaria. In D. J. Enright, and E. DeChickera (eds), English Critical Texts (Oxford University Press, London 1962). Davis, H. (1989) ‘What makes bad language bad?’, Language & Communication, 9, 1–9. Gill, S. (1990) William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford). Goldman, W. (1983) Adventures in the Screen Trade (Futura, London, 1985). Harris, R. (1990) ‘Lars Porsena revisited’. In C. Ricks, and L. Michaels (eds), The State of the Language (Faber and Faber, London) pp. 411–21. Hughes, G. (1991) Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English (Blackwell, Oxford). Jacobus, M. (1989) Romantic Writing and Sexual Difference: Essays on ‘The Prelude’ (Clarendon Press, Oxford). Jay, T. (1992) Cursing in America (John Benjamins, Philadelphia). Larkin, P. (1983) Required Writing (Faber and Faber, London). Larkin, P. (1988) Collected Poems, ed. A. Thwaite (The Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, London). Lawrence, D. H. (1928) Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1st complete text, 1960; 2nd edn, 1961; Penguin, London). Lawrence, D. H. (1929) ‘Introduction to these paintings’. In E. D. McDonald (ed.), Phoenix (Heinemann, London, 1967). Pinion, F. B. (1988) A Wordsworth Chronology (Macmillan, Basingstoke). Rawson, H. (1981) A Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk (MacDonald, London). Rochester, J. W. (1697) The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. D. M. Vieth (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1974). Rolph, C. H. (1961) The Trial of Lady Chatterley (Penguin, London). Shakespeare, W. (1623) The Tempest. In F. Kermode (ed.), The Arden Shakespeare (Methuen, London, 1975). Spivey, N. (1992) ‘Meditations on an F-theme’. The Spectator, 20 June 1992. Thomas, E. (1917) ‘Diary of Edward Thomas’. In R. G. Thomas (ed.), The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978). Ward, J. P. (1984) Wordsworth’s Language of Men (The Harvester Press, Sussex). Wordsworth, W. (1798) Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads. In W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (eds), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 1 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974). Wordsworth, W. (1799/1805/1850) The Prelude, ed. J. Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and S. Gill (W. W. Norton, New York, 1979). Wordsworth, W. (1805) Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In D. Roper (ed.), Wordsworth and Coleridge Lyrical Ballads (Collins Annotated Student Texts, London, 1968).

8 On Linearity*

I Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. 1 – Every body is in his own mess. – Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February–3 May 1819.2 Correct: and the problem is the need to write about it. That is what we call literature: the individual voice articulating the rule of linguistic law. Little Caesar: the narrative as follows. Chapter 6 Rico was standing in front of his mirror, combing his hair with a little ivory pocket-comb. Rico was vain of his hair. It was black and lustrous, combed straight back from his low forehead and arranged in three symmetrical waves. Rico was a simple man. He loved but three things: himself, his hair and his gun. He took excellent care of all three. 3 That’s the entire chapter. That’s Rico’s mess: his vanity and his gun will lead to his own death, the end of his story. * Source: First appeared in Critical Quarterly, 38 (1996), pp. 122–55. 212

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The dope-runner dropped Rico at the edge of town. It was about five o’clock in the morning and still dark. A heavy fog had come in from Lake Erie and a damp, cold wind was blowing. Rico walked up and down to keep warm while waiting for a car. He felt pretty low. ‘Yeah’, said Rico, ‘right back where I started from’. The headlight of the street car cut right through the fog. The motor-man didn’t see Rico and ran past him. ‘Ain’t that a break?’ said Rico. There wouldn’t be another car for half an hour.4 ‘Ain’t that a break’: back where he started from: no longer Little Caesar, just Rico. On the lam: wanted for killing – among others – a cop. Cesare Bandello, known as Rico – Age: 29. Height: 5ft 5 in. Weight: 125 – soon to be a dead man. Alone in his anonymous room Rico learns that one of his partners, then boss of the gang, has been sentenced to hang: Then he went over in his mind the robbery of the Casa Alvarado and all the steps that had led to his own rise and fall. ‘It made me and it broke me’, he said.5 The making and the breaking is the story of W.R. Burnett’s novel Little Caesar (1929). The focus of its language – spare, direct, demotic – is brilliantly intense and in its intensity reveals something about writing which, while a truism, needs to be remembered – perhaps. Everybody – the tale reminds us – is in their own mess. And being in the mess entails (why? is another matter) telling the tale of it. The narration of that tale in all its peculiar and particular individual details is the point about all writing which for want of a better word we shall call literature. The uses of language are dedicated to exemplifying in a variety of ways – through a number of devices and features – that simple and profoundly complex end. The evidence of that truth is explicitly articulated in the very style of Burnett’s writing and is what makes the novel a great work of art. It knows what it wants to tell and does so directly. Its clarity is its genius.

II On the other hand, what story was Eliot – another kind of genius – up to, quoting the passage from Dante which stands so self-consciously atop ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’?

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S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse a persona che mai tornasse al mondo, questa fiamma staria senza più scosse; ma percioche giammai di questo fondo non tornò viva alcun, s’i’ odo il vero, senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. ‘If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more. ‘But since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.’6 This injunction from hell seems rather ponderously to underline the fact that Prufrock – if we are responsible for our not doings as much as our doings – is in a cell of his own making. And it probably does help us towards the anticipated rejection conjured by his scrupulous imagination – And would it have been worth it, after all, ... If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.’ 7 – in so far as the epigraph suggests the uncontrollable urge, in lost souls, to confess. On the other hand that sense of entrapment, the inability to utter one’s real secret – I am alone; help me; let me speak to you – in the actual poem is reinforced by a counterbalancing fear of rejection (‘That is not it, at all’) – which is a different form of betrayal than that hinted at in the passage from Dante. Then again there are many voices in Hell, many shadows caught up within their shameful pasts and now eternally tormented. Although it is ironically consistent with the poem’s lurid engagement with the observation that solitude in life is a form of Hell – the damned are alone; nobody knows that they are there, they cannot be interceded for and besides nobody cares: couldn’t give a damn – nonetheless it still seems that Eliot is simply showing off. One might have thought that – given the poem’s title – one of the more amorous sinners would have suited: Paolo and Francesca might perhaps be heavy-handed in another way but at least they seem to be in the zone. Instead the passage from Inferno XXVII, ll. 61–6, ultimately appears recondite and, if anything, to detract from the wonderfully weary

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immediacy of that opening line – unless there is self-sufficient virtue in the simple device of contrast. Let us go then, you and I8 has a strangely unstable semantic structure. We don’t normally say ‘Let us go’ but ‘Let’s go’. If we do say ‘Let us go’ then it surely is a variant on the construction ‘Let me go’ which, of course, is an appeal against some form of bondage or imprisonment. That may revert to the epigraph in so far as it chimes with a voice from Hell, but, again, any infernal voice might do. If anything, the line’s uncertainty seems to operate precisely against the clarity of understanding your predicament; in Hell I know I am stuck: ‘Let us go’ – if insecurely – suggests the ability to move, to act, to be in command even if, in another sense, the life itself is actually determined to prevent that escape. The real puzzle nevertheless (apart from the initial pronomial riddle, who are you and who am I?) lies in the modest adverb ‘then’ which in OED2 carries the first sense of ‘at the time’. One might be inclined to read it somewhat as following within a presumed prior conversation of the order: ‘When shall we go?’ ‘How do I know?’ ‘Well, what time does she finish work? We can go then?’ This seems, however, to be creating more senses than necessary, and yet it is not utterly illegitimate since the verb of going presupposes a consciousness necessarily preoccupied by temporal matters. But the significant meaning is: OED2:3 ‘As a particle of interference, often unemphatic or enclitic [leaning on the word previous; here “go”]: i.e. that being the case; since that is so; on that account, therefore, consequently, as may be inferred; so.’ Thus the line might be rewritten: ‘So/therefore it’s time we went’. Except, ‘so’ doesn’t really help because the problem then becomes ‘so what’? For about what is ‘then’ leading us to make an inference? On reflection we understand that the very first line of the poem is in medias res: we are in the middle of an argument that the poem as a whole debates with itself; or, if you will, the persons within himself. What if he were to go? What if he were to make his visit and say And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?9 or as the question mark points out ‘shall I say . . . ?’ if, after all, I were to go, only to hear these words: ‘That is not it, at all’? Then, in fact, all things considered one would be markedly worse off; going, telling and

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being rejected. The sensible thing therefore is to stay put and indulge in a metaphorically literal wet-dream: We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown . . . 10 The poem’s persona actually argues himself into a corner: again the metaphor is literal. From the word ‘then’, (‘Let us go then . . . ’) the whole structure of the poem must follow. And this is, in fact, the logical next step from the passage by Dante. The whole of Prufrock is about repression – And should I then presume? And how should I begin?11 – and a series of suppressions, just as those lines punningly implicate a double dose of chop-logic in ‘then’ and ‘presume’. Presumptions of the logical appear in the language of heartbreaking courtesy. This may be a truly Renaissance modern poem, Shakespearean in its use of one word-field to get at something else; in this case logic for love. The logical dimension is not to be shrugged aside since that is indeed the actual point of the epigraph and the homophonic pun of the man’s name: ‘Proof-rock’: he’s a solid arguer, just like his creator. In Canto XXVII of Inferno Count Guido da Montrefeltro recounts his story: Whilst I was the form of bones and pulp, which my mother gave me, my deeds were not those of the lion, but of the fox. (non furon leonine, ma di volpe) All wiles and covert ways I knew; and used the art of them so well, that to the ends of the earth the sound went forth.12 Nevertheless, having reached that age at which ‘every one should lower sails and gather in his ropes’, Guido forswore the active life of political intrigue and joined the Franciscans in 1296. Pope Boniface – seeking to subdue the fortified redoubt of Penestrino, last stronghold of the Colonna family of Rome – turned to Guido and

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demanded counsel of me; and I kept silent, for his words seemed drunken. And then he said to me: ‘Let not thy heart misdoubt; even now I do absolve thee, and do thou teach me so to act, that I may cast Penestrino to the ground. Heaven I can shut and open, as thou knowest: for two are the keys that my predecessor held not dear.’13 Thus beguiled by logic Guido advised the Pope that treachery – ‘large promise, with small observance of it’ – (‘lunga promessa con l’attender corto’) – would bring triumph to the Papal throne. At the moment of his death, Saint Francis comes to take up Guido, the faithful servant of his Church but (and here is the point) his soul instead of taking its path, guided by Saint Francis, to be purged, experiences a grotesque and terrifying intercession – . . . one of the Black Cherubim said to him: ‘Do not take him; wrong me not. He must come down amongst my menials; because he gave the fraudulent counsel, (il consiglio frondolente) since which I have kept fast by his hair: for he who repents not, cannot be absolved; nor is it possible to repent and will a thing at the same time, the contradiction not permitting it’.14 And thus, caught out by the fact of his failure to repent his return to treachery on the worthless promise of the corrupt Pope, Guido recounts the terrible words the Black Cherubim breathed into his face: O wretched me! How I started when he seized me, saying to me: ‘May be thou didst not think that I was a logician!’ 15

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‘Forse tu non pensavi chi’io loico fossi.’ You cannot repent unless you do not will a thing at the same time: ‘nè pentere e volere insieme . . . ’16 In the Penguin edition, Dorothy L. Sayers gives this explication: Contrition is necessary if the absolution is to be valid; but a man cannot be contrite for a sin at the same time he is intending to commit it, since this involves a contradiction in logic (i.e. one cannot both will and not will the same thing at the same time); therefore the absolution obtained in these circumstances is invalid. 17 Kirkpatrick on this point says: ‘Artifice, innuendo, false argument and lies divide Guido from all that he knows at heart to be true’18 and is thus untroubled by the relationship of this incident to Prufrock: ‘Guido, Hamlet and Prufrock are the sterile products of Christian civilization, ruined by their own capacity for and by an over-sophisticated manipulation of the intentions and motives which Christianity requires the intellect to cultivate.’19 But these are two different matters entirely. That must be the point of the poem: an innocent man damned by logic, Prufrock is like Guido only to the extent that he does and does not desire; does and does not want to go; does and does not want to talk; does and does not want to tell his story. It is, all things considered, a harsh judgment. Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress.20 Eliot suppresses the quotation just as Prufrock suppresses his own active self. Dante, on the other hand, does nothing to suppress Guido’s story and triumphantly betrays his dreadful plight. The matter of self-betrayal within Eliot’s poem is more complex for the very mode itself is a treacherous form of self-expression leading naturally into that revelation otherwise known as confession. Eliot makes this clear by immediately placing after ‘Prufrock’ a poem he had in fact written before it, ‘Portrait of a Lady’, where the persona’s true confessions are all too conscientiously recorded by the author within the very poem itself. So two forms of poetry exploring the possibilities of narrative/argument are placed side by side within the first received modernist text. And this is no mistake because the fact is that narrative/argument is inevitable: Eliot knew that and played with the necessary in its manifold possibilities: every body is in his own mess and wants to tell everybody else in their own messes about it. Language bears the burden of rationality and

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yet is itself caught within strange paradoxes of the public and the private.

III Neither of these poems makes sense at all if the concept of narrative is absent from their reading. To that extent it might well be argued that these are species of narrative poems and there’s an end on the matter. But the point is that there can be no escape from the metalinguistic concept: it is one without which linguistic reality can make no sense whatsoever. The terms narrative and argument – in their broadest meanings – can be linked together, but not in a hierarchy: one can quite easily subsume the other. Nonetheless they point to the same fact, the necessity within the English language at any level of an understanding which aspires to transcend mere naming by comprehending experience sequentially and that linguistic thinking from the most literal to the most metaphorical demands this. That is the message of the young philosopher/poet: language thinking explores, in varying degrees of complexity, varieties of narrative, understanding narrative in the broadest sense already suggested, or, if you wish, linguistic thinking is constantly entertaining the possibilities of argument and that is the essence of its blessed rage for order. That is, of course, Keats’s great observation in his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’; the nature of his poetic thought makes him realise that language will and can necessarily come to conclusions, even if it is to understand that there is something which cannot be explained away – time and mortality. Thus, great linguistic thinking exemplifies the events of existence (simultaneity being understood as coeval sequence: ‘this frail / Travelling coincidence’21 of Larkin and the honeymooners) or as Johnson observes of a world in which ‘at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend’22 and ultimately will lead the mind towards the confrontation with the limit of its understanding – either in death or in the variance of incomprehensibilities which is life. That surely must be the point of Keats’s conclusion in his ode: the urn as a ‘Cold Pastoral’ will tease us out of thought by its very limitations. What it cannot do is make us aware, then, by distinction, of time’s ‘waste’: it only knows that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ which we know isn’t the truth at all. The truth means ‘where but to think’ about it is to be full of ‘sorrow / and leaden-eyed despairs’. 23 The fact of this truth is the premise for Wallace Stevens’s denial of it in ‘Of Mere Being’.

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The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze distance, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands at the edge of space The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.24 ‘It is not the reason that makes us happy or unhappy’. But here Stevens is rewriting Keats: the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is recast within the bronze decor and the bird in its palm. Here the argument is about the end of argument: but unlike, say, Beckett’s imagine dead imagine, Stevens postulates beyond the edge of ‘human meaning’, the comprehensibility of wonder at mere being. Nonetheless, the journey through the mind is the narrative, the argument takes us beyond the sense of our language and the sight of our own selves to that cascade of sounds magnificently evoking the source of life beyond thought. Nevertheless, the fire-fangled feathers dangling down exist precariously within the descriptive power of words. The poem knows that ‘fire-fangled’ takes us into the sun, life itself; equally, however, ‘fangled’ at its most apparently neutral means ‘fashioned fabricated’ (OED2) or in its more recognised sense the art of tricking out: deceiving exactly; the poem’s knowledge of itself is its own conceit – its own self-deception is an attempt at consolation, the faking up of paradise. In its counter-assertion the poem makes this point: the metaphor of moving through mental space – at the edge of the mind – to confront that which is non-thought ‘without human feeling’ demands sequentiality, invention and sense. The poem is understandable. At the genuine end of thought, however, before the incomprehensible, narrative breaks down. That is, indeed, a definition of the incomprehensible – the point beyond which sequential language cannot take us. Keats realises this in ‘Ode on Melancholy’. The poem appears to indulge in a random logic, a free association which seems to move away from the contention of narrative necessity. Why are the stanzas in the order

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by which we know them? But if we look at the poem with that question in mind we can come to this: Stanza I – The symptoms of melancholy: an intense desire for death; the serious possibility of suicide. Stanza II – The disease itself; immediate emergency procedures against it; prescription of necessary emotional medication: Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.25 The key word is ‘feed’: ingest those eyes and not the fatal pharmacopoeia (‘nightshade’) of Stanza I; this seems a true opposition. And yet that simple contradiction disguises the deeper complex of associated significance Keats is here examining. In a letter to Reynolds of 3 May 1818, Keats wrote ‘Every department of knowledge we see excellent and calculated towards a great whole. I am so convinced of this, that I am glad at not having given away my medical Books, which I shall again look over to keep alive the little I know thitherwards . . . ’26 The Apothecary-Line drives deep into the poetic counterpart: ‘thy mistress some rich anger . . . ’ is ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’: She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept and sigh’d full sore, And there I shut her wild wild eyes With kisses four.27 The eyes! Bella donna leads into belladonna: deadly nightshade has a subtle if precarious relationship with the line ‘feed deep deep upon her peerless eyes’. ‘[P]eerless’ is overtly punning, but to what end? It seems to be a play for playing’s sake – Keats simply being unable to control his genius for associations and here going too far; why should her unequalled eyes be unseeing, unless in her rich anger she is incapable of taking in her lover’s image as he gazes upon her. On the other hand, if we pursue the poet-apothecary and presume that the eyes gazing into the mistress’s eyes are actually engaged in a forensic examination – ‘If thy mistress . . . ’ – then the belladonna association indeed becomes itself rich: ‘a poisonous European plant (Atropa belladone) of the nightshade family, with purplish or reddish bell-shaped flowers and shiny black berries; deadly nightshade; it is the source of atropine: 1788’.

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Atropine: ‘deadly nightshade . . . poisonous crystalline alkaloid, C17H2303N, obtained from belladonna and similar plants: used to relieve spasms and dilate the pupil of the eye’ (OED2). Indeed, ‘belladonna lit. Beautiful lady, a folk etymology influenced by cosmetic use for dilating the eye’. Thus peerless is far from a random association but exactly then connotes both the increased beauty and the fact that when sufficiently dilated the eyes cannot see at all, clearly allowing, therefore, the poet, attendant upon the apothecary, to gaze scientifically deep into the soul engaged in a homeopathic linguistic act: bella donna poison antidoting belladonna. The irony here is that the apparent ‘cure’ is revealed ultimately to be an illusion: indeed the disease ‘Melancholy’ springs from its apparent cure. The antidote is, in fact, the poison. The passage is, nevertheless, sequential even if only ultimately turning in on itself: it has used the power of association to the limit and works at the limit of accepted logicality. Equally it also faces genuine incomprehensibility since the ultimate discovery must be left unexplained: why is she angry? The answer to that question is beyond the power of the poetscientist’s precisely analytic mind. Stanza III – The deep diagnosis: the pathology of the disease discovers it to lie within the ‘Joy’ of life itself; indeed within the very fact of honey that is, at its very genesis, ‘Poison while the bee-mouth sips’. As anticipated in the previous stanza the homeopathy is in fact its own inverse: the cure is the disease. But this is a truth known to few. Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine . . . 28 Secreted within the temple of delight, within the shrine lies ‘veil’d Melancholy’: that is as far as the power to narrate an explanation can go: the line of thought must, in the end, run up against that which ultimately is a single solipsistic experience; as secret as can be imagined: the bursting of the grape within the complex of speech production – thereby communicating the incommunicable. Hence the stanza’s argument is focused through the conclusion that the ‘soul shall taste the sadness of [Melancholy’s] might’. Every body really is alone in this mess.

IV That word ‘taste’ perhaps seasons the poem’s melancholy conclusion but it is important that we appreciate the nature of the defeat we have

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been invited to share: making the best of a bad job – to be Empsonian about it – is perhaps the most we can hope for. Certainly if we can say this is the worst then it is not. It is all, in another sense, still to play for since we have got to be – as fully as possible – conscious of true incomprehensibility, i.e. that confrontation with experience into which the mind can no longer with clarity go – as against its bogus parody. There are, obviously, notorious examples to dwell on here; moments of, say, Eliot, in the The Waste Land and Ash Wednesday. But these have, under sustained critical pressure and elucidation, fallen into shape. This comes about because, as Eliot himself remarked of poetry’s ambiguities and uncertainties, ‘the poem means more, not less, than ordinary speech can communicate’: 29 we have to discover patiently in time how to listen to the radically new voice speaking to us. Thus, in the case of The Waste Land it is clear that once the major structure has been recognised, the poem does indeed convey a very strong narrative about the incomprehensible: it is a five-act sequence which starts with the crude fact of the body’s death – ‘The Burial of the Dead’ – ‘Stetson! ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? ‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?’30 and the notable absence of any form of spiritual continuity after death; follows on with death’s only counter, sex – ‘A Game of Chess’ – to retreat back into death given the absence yet again of what we might, for the want of a better word, call the spiritual – love – through the dramatic monologue on abortion; persists with sex and the absence of affection or love – ‘The Fire Sermon’ – therefore, by the fourth act, giving up on the whole business of life completely. The very element which should carry enormous symbolic power, as a representation of the triumph of the spiritual, does precisely the opposite: ‘Death by Water’; Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.31 But then, because the show’s not over until the fifth act, the poem retreats from the remorseless logic of materiality and struggles with – at last – some

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attempt at resurrecting an idea of spiritual transcendence of some, of any, kind. Hence the flirtation with comprehensibility lost to the English linguistic imagination since the death of Romanticism in that war out of which Eliot was writing: ‘What the Thunder said’ is a Coleridgeian assertion recalling ‘Frost at midnight’: But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in himself.32 (second emphasis mine) The unassumed irony of Eliot’s early writing is in the manner of its reception as breaking down all such ways of thought. That Eliot was intellectually a deep sceptical idealist only made the pressure to seek exactly the intelligibility Coleridge describes all the more powerful. Here, in fact, is Coleridge identifying the absolute as comprehensible, which is precisely the opposite of Bradley’s idealist scepticism and his theory of the necessity of degrees of truth. You can only know so much; you cannot know anything absolutely; to know absolutely you must know the absolute; i.e. the totality of all appearances. All utterances about appearances will be relatively true or false except this one. This is part of a particular version of the coherence theory of truth which Eliot sought, as a philosophy student, to explicate and defend. Truths are true to the degree in which they cohere within a system of other truths. It is as a consequence that his poetry was always deliberately skating over as thin a surface of meaning as could be possible, over an abyss of incoherence towards some form of comprehension. ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ lead only to the final assertion in a strange tongue – ‘Shantih Shantih Shantih’ – of something which lies beyond rationality. Eliot’s note makes this clear – ‘“The Peace which passeth understanding” is our equivalent to this word.’ 33 Building on this observation makes us aware that the function of language then is in its capacity to take us to the limits of thought: that it is necessary to any revelatory use of words that they should be precise

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in telling where we can no longer hope to journey. In Hamlet, the Ghost lets him know what he would think of a son who didn’t get on with the revenge: And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, Wouldst thou not stir in this.34 The metaphor takes us on its logical progress to a conclusion – try to think, on the spot, of anything that could be more inert than a fat weed rooted in its ease in the river of forgetfulness and oblivion: not just a weed but a fat weed; not just rooted but rooted ease. So we are – for a moment – compelled to believe that Shakespeare has taken us to the very edge of linguistic activity, pointed down into the murky depths of thought and said: here, to be precise, this is the ultimate in inertia. Can you get beyond it? The criteria of understanding demand then this combination of specificity and determinability: its physical absence as Milton makes so painfully clear is what burdens his blindness – ‘this dark world and wide’.35 He is unable to see the edges, everything has been interiorised. Narrative which recognises its own necessity is that which does more than simply compel our attention. It drives us back onto things which we are no longer able simply to hold off. The power of writing then is its power to make us, adapting Conrad, see how far we can actually see: whether we like it or not.

V I am tired of the Theatres. Almost all the parties I may chance to fall into I know by heart – I know the different Styles of talk in different places: what subject will be started, how it will proceed, like an acted play, from the first to the last Act – if I go to Hunt’s I run my head into many-times heard puns and music. 36 Linearity precludes the possibility of uttering two words simultaneously.37 All too famously, Johnson of Shakespeare’s style wrote: A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the sacrifice of reason, propriety and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. (my emphasis) 38

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‘By the sacrifice of reason’: this seems a strange assertion, suggesting as it does that metonym of Cleopatra which concludes the paragraph: Shakespeare is the Antony of language driven by a foolish demeaning lust, forgoing his Empire for the quick fix of Eastern pleasures. Indeed, if we consult OED2 we see the effect of Johnson’s disgust: Quibble . . . 1611 [perh. dim. of quib (1550/1656), ad. of L. quibus, dat. or abl. pl. of qui who, which, as a word much used in legal documents] 1. A play upon words, a pun. 2. An equivocation, evasion of the point at issue; an argument depending on some likeness of differences between words or their meanings, or on some purely trivial circumstances 1670 . . . 2. To a plain understanding his objections seem to be mere quibbles. It is interesting how much the quibble/pun carries with it a bad reputation; an evasion of the point at issue; an argument depending upon trivial circumstances. Johnson’s own definition – which we assume must lie to some degree behind the OED’s – is as follows: Quibble. n.s. [from quidlibet, Latin.] A slight eavil; a low conceit depending on the sound of words; a pun. This may be of great use to immortalize puns and quibbles, and to let posterity see their forefathers were block heads. Addison. Quirks or quibbles have no place in the search after truth. Watts. Having once fully answered your quibble, you will not, I hope, expect that I should do it again and again. Waterland. To Quibble. v.n. [from the noun.] To pun; to play on the sound of words.39 The first service was neats tongue sliced, which the philosophers took occasion to discourse and quibble upon in a grave way. L’Estrange. Quibbler. n.f. [from quibble.] A punster.40 Johnson’s citation of Watts makes clear the sinister demi-mondaine threat that the quibble has for all men of good faith. Nevertheless it is hard to conceive that this recognisable linguistic function can in no way – apparently – help us in our attempt to understand the completion of languages. Yet the obvious point for Johnson is that the concept of quibble is taken as in some manner directing us away from external

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truths and into confusion. Simultaneity of meaning corrupts. This is clear from Johnson’s entry for ‘pun’: Pun. n.s. [I know not whence this word is to be deduced: to pun, is to grind or beat with pestle; can pun mean an empty sound, like that of a mortar beaten, as clench, the old word for pun, seems only a corruption of click?] An equivocation; a quibble; an expression where a word has at once different meanings. To Pun. v.n. [from the noun.] To quibble; to use the same word at once in different senses. The hand and head were never lost, of those Who dealt in doggerel, or who pun’d in prose. Dryd. You would be a better man, if you could pun like Sir Tristram.41 Tatler. The citation from Dryden makes clear the low regard in which this activity seems to have been held during the crucial transformative Augustan establishment of linguistic legitimacies – the word pun carries with it the serious stain of illegitimacy; we cannot produce a sound etymology for it: its parentage is obscure, to say the least. Why, however, is it perceived to be such a counterproductive act? One obvious point to make now is that the definitions allow for no sense that the act of punning, while not necessarily tidying up the external world, may be expressing some very important fact of language itself and thus of the human psyche. In which case the suspicions of Johnson and others right up to the OED1 are expressions of a need to repress the recognition of what that particular act might be. And it may be well that Shakespeare – consciously or not – was aware of that fact. Looking back at the OED2 and then Johnson, it is evident that the contempt for quibbling/punning is indeed Augustan: the clear normative definition is 1670. Yet this might well appear to be odd since at the same time the word ‘Wit’ was held to be – within certain constraints – a good thing. Wit has, of course, been done to death and it would be a weary digression to follow again its strange and – at moments – tormented path. Needless to say, Johnson is once more part of the problem: in his life of Cowley he attempts to redeem the idea of wit from Pope’s definition in his Essay on Criticism: True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest,

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Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find, That gives us back the Image of our Mind:42 Johnson, taking up Pope’s text: If Wit be well described by Pope, as being ‘that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed,’ they [the Metaphysicals] certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavored to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope’s account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.43 Pope in turn was following Dryden who rescued it from the earlier poets of his own century for affecting the metaphysics and clearly wishes to distinguish between ‘clench’ (see Johnson above) or a ‘mauvais bouffon’ (Dryden)44 as distinct from wit ‘a propriety of thoughts and words’. 45 To some extent all this is in itself perhaps a sequence of quibbles; an evasion of the point at issue. Because the fact is that Johnson and the earlier Augustans were trying to keep the baby even as the bath water was being sloshed out onto the street below. Clenches, puns, quibbles are clearly related to the pseudo-dignified wit for which an etymology can be provided, i.e. witan, to know, see, wise; whereas pun is some kind of louche wide boy joshing and leering and generally misbehaving because he has no sense of responsibility. It makes it hard if the culture is attempting to puff the national poet to have him roaring about in the ale house of language instead of browsing among booksellers or at least idling in the coffee-shop or taking water in the tavern. On the other hand, it might be constructive to start from the admission that wit (in any sense we may wish to accept it) and quibble share this common feature: simultaneity. That is to say, taking Johnson’s most restrained definition, we can be made aware of the natural and the new. Or, to take Eliot’s observation on wit in his essay on ‘The Metaphysical poets’: ‘a degree of heterogeneity of material [is] compelled into unity’.46 In the pun unity is found – it is asserted by Johnson – through the identity of sounds. In which case we can argue that we have isolated one specific feature: ‘an argument depending on some likeness or difference between words or their meanings’ (OED). Webster here is actually more helpful in simply allowing for words ‘which are formed or sounded alike’.

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VI To see the pun as wit’s buffoonish sibling actually – ironically – helps us understand the nature of the activity in drawing together apparently random connections between words. And yet, in truth, Shakespeare’s most celebrated single puns are, on the contrary, not exactly random or trivially circumstantial: Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.47 Or again, taking a less obvious and less heavy-handed joke – in Sonnet 81: Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten, From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all the world must die. The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombèd in men’s eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead, You still shall live – such virtue hath my pen – Where breath most breathes, ev’n in the mouths of men.48 (emphasis mine) As Stephen Booth points out in his notes to this sonnet, ‘monument’ is the word upon which ‘the wit of the poem largely depends’:49 the root sense of – in fact – a pun is a reminder: ‘monument’ recalls not only a grave marker but also a carved effigy. The gentle verse – i.e. the poem – also alludes to the ‘epitaph: verse cut into a grave marker’. All of which leads up to the crucial pun of line eleven: And tongues to be your being shall rehearse which Booth glosses as: ‘rehearse (1) recite; (2) recount (with play on the verb “to hearse”, meaning “to enclose in a coffin” – “to rehearse” suggests “to hold another funeral for”, to “bury again”)’. 50 The joke I take it is in rereading and so in that sense the dead are brought to active life even as they are buried.

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This seems a fair enough quibble; one which is hardly dependent upon the mere vagaries of whimsy. On the other hand, it is the case that Shakespeare is being metaphysical in bringing together the idea of the dramatic and the mortal to present the profound ideas of death and of eternal resurrection. Nonetheless it might be argued from a Johnsonian position: and so? What has Shakespeare proved other than that he is clever with words: a nifty pun which would appeal with its sly in-joke reference to theatricality? The defence might argue on some sort of historical grounds that Johnson’s prescriptive views as to what’s on and not on linguistically are pretty flimsy and that the shading from wit to pun is arbitrary and can be resolved only on an ad hoc basis. Nevertheless, is that not criticism? But under pressure there would have to be a concession to some set of principles, some theory, however dim, which would sustain a rationalising prosecution not to mention defence. And indeed Johnson’s quotation of Watts makes clear that he is in these entanglements within his own terms: quibbles have no place in the search for truth; wit, on the other hand, is ‘strength of thought’. It would be a happy manoeuvre if, on turning to Johnson’s own poetry, we could come up with a pun or two. Of course the defence might well be that on being pressed Johnson would engage in self-criticism: however, so far as one can tell, the poetry is sustained by his own criterion for wit – ‘strength of thought’: ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’ is apparently pun-free. It is, moreover, ‘natural and new’ in so far as it imitates yet recreates Juvenal’s ‘Tenth Satire’. A comparison between Dryden’s version and Johnson’s here establishes some sense of the drawing away from Shakespeare and all that he implies. From the passage on the vanity of wishing for longevity: The Skull and Forehead one Bald Barren plain; The Gums unarm’d to Mumble Meat in vain: Besides th’Eternal Drivel that supplies The dropping Beard, from Nostrils, Mouth and Eyes 51 The wit of this passage is – presumably – focused through the words ‘Mumble’ and ‘Drivel’. For ‘mumble’ OED2 offers, as the primary meaning here, that of speaking indistinctly: Dryden takes up the second and rare application, ‘to chew or bite softly’. OED2 deems it to be rare and then cites the line from Dryden. But the play continues in the next line where the opposite takes place: we assume the focus is on the secondary meaning of ‘Drivel’ – to talk ‘childishly or idiotically’; since this is

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sustained by the word ‘supplies’, we anticipate ‘supplies’ of senile words. And then Dryden wittily crosses back to the primary meaning which is, of course, the flow of mucus from the mouth and lips as observed in ‘children and idiots’. The joke is concluded neatly by the transference of ‘dropping’ – ‘dropping saliva’ – onto the Beard, getting at the final anatomical detail of the slack jaw and/or the beard itself falling out, as in the skull and forehead’s Barren Plain. Next to this slam-bang knockabout, Johnson himself seems to be some what etiolated: With listless Eyes the Dotard views the Store, He views, and wonders that they please no more; Now pall the tastless Meats and joyless Wines, And Luxury with Sighs her Slave resigns. 52 Indeed, the last line is Johnson’s periphrastic/euphemistic report on Juvenal’s gleeful account of senile impotence; rendered thus by Dryden: The limber Nerve, in vain provok’d to rise, Inglorious from the Field of Battel flies . . . 53 Dryden is manifestly witty yet still close to the lowness of Shakespearean quibbling. His effects are achieved through sustained tropes and their inversions. Johnson, on the other hand, can achieve results that Dryden must forgo: Superfluous lags the Vet’ran on the Stage.54 Ironically, this is equally Shakespearean, precisely in its evocation of not just the grand style, but of the animating theatrical metaphor. So that we would want to accept Johnson’s sense of true wit’s dignity in a line where the resonances of vanity are invoked: the verb ‘lags’ suggests the Veteran actor embarrassingly refusing to accept the truth of time and change. There are eight separate entries for ‘lag’ in OED2 but only this particular meaning is, in any sense whatsoever, engaged with. Equally the Veteran’s superfluousness is remorselessly emphasised by the figure’s specific relevance to the poem’s argument: what could be more vain than the vanity of the actor who refuses to get off the stage? Johnson’s line has, then, that quality of one kind of great writing: it gets you into the grand theme through the sharp witty focus upon the

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individuality of perceptions; sharp unambiguous words with their exact understood meaning.

VII If the above holds, then it seems that Johnson has a single point that needs consideration: is there any reason for the low form of wit other than for the fun of it? The high style is a if not the true style. A possible solution here might be to turn Wordsworth loose on Johnson and, citing the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, point out that on the anti-diction argument – the real language of men – puns should be in because they are one of the ways people structure their thoughts. Indeed the lowness of the pun should make it an honoured constituent of the poet’s linguistic community. On this argument it is irrelevant whether or not Wordsworth himself is open to the quibble since this is the assertion of a genuine principle; i.e. poetry is in no way a deviant language with necessarily rule-breaking qualities to distinguish it from proper uses of language. Hence it would be perfectly OK to write a poem which incorporated the Sun’s headline concerning the English football team’s loss to the players of the Swedish national side as: Swedes 2; Turnips 1. Equally it would be proper to leave that out. By now, it is clear enough that we have becalmed the argument within the open seas’ response to language: any word or even non-‘word’ is there to be used and/or abused. There has to be another way to decide whether or not its appearance within the construct is in some way an articulation of arguable value(s). So as far as the quibble or pun goes it would be consistent to say simply in a pragmatic fashion: does it work? And if it seems to: why? If not: why not? In short, the poet is a pragmatist. And we can perhaps revise the variety of titles that have arisen concerning puns, quibbles, clenches – or what you will – by collapsing all specific terms within a generic embrace and be happy merely to call such linguistic play at work examples – however varied – of wit. Now, in this context, Whitman’s observations about language and how it works make very good sense. In the Preface to Leaves of Grass Whitman concluded that the poetry of America, the poem of America, could still be written in a foreign tongue: The English language befriends the Grand American expression . . . it is brawny enough and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of race who through all change of circumstances was never without the idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has

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attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful language of resistance . . . it is the dialect of common sense . . . It is the chosen tongue to express growth faith self-steam freedom justice equality friendliness amplitude prudence decision and courage. It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressible.55 English works. It works because it has features which are relevant to Whitman’s understanding of his own task as an American poet: One’s-Self I Sing One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.56 The Modern Man I sing. And his journey, as Lawrence understood in Studies in Classic American Literature, passed along The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above’. Not even ‘within’. The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within’. It is a wayfarer down the open road. . . . Only through the journey down the open road. The journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal. Always the open road.57 There is no goal, true. The individual moves amidst the en-masse along the road and the poet writes of that adventure. But there is, of course, the end and that is because the poet must as Whitman understands ‘compete with the laws that pursue and follow time’ 58 (emphasis mine).

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Which is why Whitman marks the moment of his adolescence when he became aware of his own creative destiny: that is, the moment he understood the word ‘death’.

A word then, (for I will conquer it,) The word final, superior to all, Subtle, sent up – what is it? – I listen; Are you whispering it, and have been all the time, you sea-waves? Is that it from your liquid rims and wet sands? Whereto answering, the sea, Delaying not, hurrying not, Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak, Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death, And again death, death, death, death, Hissing melodious, neither like the bird nor like my arous’d child’s heart, But edging near as privately for me rustling at my feet, Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over, Death, death, death, death, death.59

This is Whitman’s democracy: the equality of souls journeying down the open roads to death. That is why the word must be redeemed; understood as the end of all those journeys: all roads at that end becoming the same road. And that is also why Whitman requires in any poetry of value to compete with the laws that pursue and follow time. It is the double explanation therefore of Whitman’s own great formal revolution: the constraints of metrical pattern and rhyming schemes are eliminated. Instead there is the democracy of the line’s own integrity: each line is its own soul; each line is as long or as short as it needs to be. All lines are equally travelling towards their own silence; the mimetic representation of the soul’s journey on the open road to its final destination: death. And then the next line: life. Whitman operates then at an extreme in this necessary confrontation with language. The confrontation with – in another mode of expression – Saussure’s ‘Second Principle’; the linear characteristic of the signal:

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The linguistic signal, being auditory in nature, has a temporal aspect, and hence certain temporal characteristics: (a) it occupies a certain temporal space, and (b) this space is measured in just one dimension: it is a line. This principle is obvious, but it seems never to be stated, doubtless because it is considered too elementary. However it is a fundamental principle and its consequences are incalculable . . . The whole mechanism of linguistic structure depends upon it . . . Unlike visual signals (e.g. ships’ flags) which can exploit more than one dimension simultaneously, auditory signals have available to them only the linearity of time. The elements of such signals are presented one after another: they form a chain. This feature appears immediately when they are represented in writing, and a spatial line of graphic signs is substituted for a succession of sounds in time.60 The linearity of language can be dealt with in many different ways: thus Whitman can accept the fact and work explicitly within a recognition of its sombre implications. Equally, I would suggest, Johnson’s carefully balanced couplets are a stoical recognition that the drive of the line is the drive of language through time to but one destiny: ‘nor think the doom of man reversed for thee’. The significant distinction between Johnson and Whitman lies, however, in the suggestion that Johnson’s line seeks its couple and the couplet implies therefore a teleological progress: each line has an anticipated and predicted destiny; a fulfilment of its existence is found in the completion of its function. The line is not random, unlike Whitman. ‘Linearity precludes the possibility of uttering two words simultaneously’: this would seem to be incontrovertible until we return to our point of origin and reconsider the pun or quibble. It would be difficult to conceive of a more driven and unfrivolous poet than Hopkins and yet here is the crux of his most famous poem: the sestet of ‘The Windhover’: Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!61 Obviously, Hopkins points us to it when he capitalises AND; for, although the previous line seems to be suggesting seriality, in fact the conjunctions are straining to offer an image of simultaneity: this is the bird; these are the properties of the bird and those properties are then understood to be a prescience of the qualities of Christ. And those are

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revealed through the key word ‘Buckle!’ For here is word denying – or attempting to deny – linearity: the two quite distinct meanings: OED2 ‘To join closely. 4. To unite in marriage. 6. To warp, crumple, bend out of its plane . . . To bend under pressure’. Hopkins wishes to insist upon the simultaneity of the disaster and triumph of the crucifixion: ‘Christ our Lord . . . was doomed to succeed by failure’.62 In so far as it is possible to sustain the contradictions simultaneously – then to that degree we are overriding linearity. Hopkins of course had his own particular beliefs to articulate through his quibble. When we reconsider Shakespeare, one of the problems is – obviously – that no such sense of purpose is apparent. However, Keats is very helpful here: One of the three Books I have with me is Shakespear’s Poems: I never found so many beauties in the Sonnets – they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits. 63 Caroline Spurgeon in Keats’s Shakespeare64 gives an exhaustive list of his particular markings of the sonnets, clearly noting these flashes of the unconscious working linguistically to transform the medium: the intense working out of conceits so that – to quote a line by Shakespeare noted by Keats – To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.65 And this is exactly the point of the conceit, pun or quibble, indeed of all the various manifestations of wit: that is in the attempt to cheat linearity. Which is to cheat time. Keat’s own work is – not surprisingly – obsessed by this illusion. The whole major conceit of a poem like ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is an attempt to make us hear with the eyes. So the final stanza starts its meditation upon the way in which the still jar manages to tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral66 which I understand to be as Empson suggests: It teases us out of thought; it stops us thinking; the idea is more suited to a mystical ecstasy than a metaphysical puzzle. And we have reached this condition though a ‘sacrifice’; for that matter the usual function of an Urn is to hold the ashes of the dead.67

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And continues with lines which would no doubt have had Johnson reaching for the delete button: O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought . . . 68 1 ‘O’: a mimetic representation of the jug’s roundness. cf. Wallace Stevens’s rewriting of the Ode: ‘Anecdote of the Jar’: The jar was round upon the ground. And tall and of a port in air.69 That is, as Empson notes, if this O has any content it is but ashes. Something which is in fact nothing. How effective then is the further conceit of the meaningless particle: O which is itself something but also nothing. 2 Fair attitude: originally a technical term of the Arts of Design. OED2 1. In Fine Arts: The disposition of attitude in statuary or painting: hence the posture given to it. Not only does the term insist on this technical origin and domain but it is, of course, also returning the reader to the Attic past, hence resisting the necessary linear progression of language the poem is so desperate to escape. One might want to go further – and vulgarise the line somewhat – by thinking that the implications of Fair are embedded within its etymological ancestor: feria L. holiday. 3 brede: OED2 roast meat: i.e. relative to breed. But technically presumably as in braid: the working of the artist on the Urn. The intertwining of the figures and their stories of art and death: the unknown narratives the poet has wondered at in contemplating the pot. 4 overwrought: OED wrought; created, shaped, moulded and here, presumably, it is the image of the forest branches wrought over – i.e. above – the procession. But overwrought (OED2) as itself has no meanings but ‘Exhausted by overwork b. Worked up to too high a pitch’. This is quite at odds with the supposed tone, the coldness of the scene, but of course looks backwards – against the line – to Stanza 3 and its lurid description of desire the marble men and maidens experience: That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d A burning forehead and a parching tongue.70

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These lines take us beyond Shakespeare’s dictum that the end of verse is to ‘hear with eyes’: – Keats seeks a beyond – namely to express through a conceit the ability not only to hear with eyes (the urn is an intensely visual experience challenging language itself) but also to imagine yet again the interiority of desire. ‘The burning forehead and the parching tongue’ are known through the faculty of feeling. The forehead can be felt by the physician, the tongue is parched to the patient. All of which simply takes us back to the word ‘overwrought’ and its plurality of connotations: it is a quibble. The extension of Keats here is in the realisation that, at the extreme of illness (burning, parched) he has taken us into the extreme of desire – and procreative life. And that may be the psychological truth of the ‘quibble’. As language, trapped in the remorseless logic of its progression, leads to but one end, so – within certain constraints and certain mental sets particularly within writers who may be said to lack faith in the outcome of that progression – Hopkins notwithstanding (for in his case it is the very celebration of the plenitude of creation that is being asserted: ‘inscapeness’) – the pun or quibble has the function of cheating time and hence cheating death. As Eliot sombrely notes: If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable (‘Burnt Norton’)71 Linearity is the dominion of that eternal present. It is this which the quibbling Shakespeare in sonnet after sonnet sets out to transcend. It is this which Keats – following the example – indulges in to the extreme of coherence from the very same need. In his last known letter – from Rome on 30 November – Keats wrote this: I am so weak (in mind) that I cannot bear the sight of any hand writing of a friend I love so much as I do you. Yet I ride the little horse, – and, at my worst, even in Quarantine summoned up more puns, in a sort of desperation, in one week than in any year of my life.72 Finally, it is interesting to note that Jakobson, in the ‘Dialogue on Time in Language and Literature’, realises the full implications of Saussure’s simple principle while pointing to what he believes must be its self-evident weakness:

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Saussure’s ideology ruled out any compatibility between the aspects of time, simultaneity and succession. As a result, dynamism was excluded from the study of the system and the signans was reduced to pure linearity, thus precluding any possibility of viewing the phoneme as a bundle of concurrent distinctive features. Each of these mutually contradictory theses sacrificed one of the two dimensions of time, one by renouncing succession in time and the other by renouncing coexisting temporal elements. 73 It is, Jakobson declares, his duty to overcome such ‘illegitimate reductionism’74 and he agrees with a denunciation of such critics as cursed with a ‘lack of imagination about how time is experienced: for some reason the principle of a single time, constantly flowing and immutably dynamic, remained beyond the grasp of these critics’.75 Further, Jakobson extends his critique into the confirmation that linearity in no way can account for the differences between spoken and written language: i.e. when we speak there is a purely temporal character, ‘When we read we usually [sic] have immobile letters before us and the time of the written flow of words is reversible . . . ’76 Indeed, far from being – as it were – underprivileged by the necessary constraints of temporality, language and particularly written poetic language is unilinear as well as multilinear, direct as well as reversed, continuous as well as discontinuous . . . ‘I believe that it would be difficult to find another domain, except perhaps for music, where time is experienced with compatible acuity’.77 As I have tried to suggest, the nature of the true poet’s perception of time is precisely in the response he or she makes with regard to the opposite. We are trapped, whether verbally or within a written system, by the mortality of succession: the remarkable fact is to observe how different poets at different times choose either to accept or transcend this enchainment. Johnson accepts; Keats attempts at crucial linguistic moments to transcend – most significantly in his use of multivalent words. This, incidentally, is quite distinct from a poet like Eliot who seeks his escape through the ambiguities of syntax. It is a blunder of some proportions that Jakobson’s interlocutor is allowed to signal the significant irrefutability of synchrony by choosing a metonym of Block’s concerning the role of rhythm in driving language towards self-fulfilment: ‘the rhythmic word is sharpened like an arrow that flies directly towards its goal’.78 Exactly: and you cannot have a polysemic arrow: so that Jakobson is overburdening language and impoverishing it at the same time.

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It would appear then that Jakobson has replaced an ideal of language for the pragmatic truth of its nature. The idea and the word itself in this sense are operators within two different but overlaid maps. If you really believe that language can approach the state of music in terms of simultaneity think of a musical chord: notes are overlaid upon each other so that the listener not only gets different tones but also different instruments etc. Now the linguistic analysis offered by Jakobson would demand that somehow we could overlay one word – or even a phoneme – with another, and another, and another to our increasing satisfaction. Whereas, of course, quite the opposite is the result. Such an endeavour would simply bring utter chaos and incoherence which is why Johnson’s hostility to Shakespeare’s quibbling has perfectly reasonable political and social arguments deep within itself. ‘Country matters’:79 Hamlet’s obscene pun in response to his mother/ Ophelia at the beginning of The Mousetrap reminds us that the pun is most closely allied with the beginning and the end of lives: ‘A grave man’. And that it is the most volatile linguistic response to the fact of the big sleep. We enter this world jabbering; crying; not yet speakers, and we close in many different ways: ‘The rest is silence’. But in medias res – so to speak – of our journeys we do attempt through different forms – in the vase before us – especially through the wit of the pun, to deny linearity even as we know that such a denial is a necessary fiction. Johnson’s refusal to indulge himself in such forms of escape is noble and by no means contemptible: we must lead lives that have some kind of rational linear decorum to themselves. I have of course been speculating throughout but it seems necessary to me – for what that is worth – to set the differences in this kind of context. And although Saussure is surely right equally it is the case that his principle upon linearity elides into other forms of linguistic activity. Proper narrative, like proper metaphor or proper analysis, presents us with ‘must be’ or ‘have been’: there is in that sense no room for speculative inventions. That is why Shakespeare deals with a tricky plot point in Hamlet as he does immediately following the graveyard scene:80 Hamlet: Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting That would not let me sleep. Methought I lay Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly – And praised be rashness for it: let us know Our indiscretion sometime serves us well When our dear plots do pall, and that should teach us

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There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will –81 ‘Rashly’ is the crucial word since it serves time as an invitation to understand that there are things we do not understand which, of course, become the key points in Hamlet’s final resolution to fence: ‘If it be now . . . Let be’. 82 There is a stoic acceptance of nature, life and his place in it which is based precisely on not being able to talk or write about it. On another level, of course, ‘Rashly’ serves to sustain the character itself – no longer a famous procrastinator, a fat weed, Hamlet now acts on impulse beyond reason. He has come thus to a point when indeed words will no longer be of any use and his life must act itself – again in both senses – out to the very end. This is the key moment then of the creature, the action’s profound transformation and its resolution towards the denouement’s tragic catharsis. It also solves self-consciously a problem which Eliot picked up in an observation about Hamlet the character which is actually not as facile as it first appears: ‘So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure’. And the reason for this failure is that the play has at its very centre ‘intractable material’, 83 namely a fact which Hamlet cannot handle: that his mother is sexually active and has betrayed his father. Where Eliot is facile is in arguing that this failure to create a sufficient objective correlative is an aesthetic blot on the play’s struture. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. 84 Exactly, and so the play’s bizarre power arises from Hamlet recognising and forcing us to recognise that there is something which not even he – top-drawer thinker – can talk about other than in the descriptive terms which simply express his disgust. Did this woman connive to kill my father? What’s she like in bed? Well, she must be pretty good if she can get Claudius to kill his brother . . . What can one say? Nothing but to describe – narrate – what he imagines goes on. It’s pretty torrid. Nay but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,

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Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty –85 ‘Rank sweat’ – they must be at it hammer and tongs and Claudius (unlike Hamlet it would seem if we think of Ophelia) certainly gets what he wants: ‘enseamed’. The Arden glosses that word as ‘saturated with seam . . . i.e. animal fat, grease’86 but, of course, its role is not to say ‘semen’ (late medieval) OED2, which really is unspeakable since that gets us into procreation and thoughts of his own creation. ‘Love’ is, of course, exactly the right wrong word: does Hamlet have ringing in his ears his own father’s description of his mother’s sex-life and the right word? So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage.87 Hamlet signs off exactly as one should expect: he has reached the greatest incomprehension and that is obviously the end of his story: ‘the rest is silence’. Except that it isn’t for the ‘real’ story of Hamlet: the drama is about the dissolution of Denmark before the advance of young Fortinbras; that is, the undoing of all old Hamlet’s work in killing old Fortinbras. Hamlet’s position is exactly paralleled by Fortinbras: both are under the ‘guidance’ of their uncles but, of course, there is one major difference: Norway is ‘impotent and bedrid’ – words uttered by Claudius which have their own ironical relevance indeed. The fact that Shakespeare makes the profound historical consequences of the Danish catastrophe subservient to Hamlet’s personal narrative is a shocking dimension of its modernity. And, in a sense, Hamlet is right: the story really is over with his silence. There is nothing more to tell because the narrative was of that consciousness and its attempts to speak as far as could be spoken thoughts about the unthinkable: the undiscovered country. Representing the unrepresentable is that which we might best leave then to something called imagination or metaphorical narrative. The undiscovered country, exactly. From whose bourn no traveller has returned simply confirms the point – and yet it raises the question of contradiction: how far can we actually speak of the unspeakable? J. H. Prynne approaches this matter in ‘English Poetry and Emphatical Language’ with the following observation concerning ‘near-inarticulate particles of speech’.

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She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me. [O]f such particles, oh is the most widespread and important in the history of English poetic diction, and has given difficulty to grammarians and lexicographers alike. Both in emotional reference and in grammatical function it seems locked unconstruably into the interiority of the uttering subject.88 Prynne expands his discussion to look at the various functions of the particle historically – its rhetorical and religious associations – but even when we notice that it is operating as an apostrophe as in the following – Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.89 – we are aware of the inarticulate dimension to the utterance. The whole point is that there is again nothing more to be said beyond the feeble ‘consider’. And nothing to be done. The significance of the particle’s expression of the inexpressible is emphasised by Eliot’s earlier French version of these lines where there is a sardonic Gallic cynicism to the voice, a matter of factness which is quite distinct from the ominous absence of sense in the later Waste Land version: Figurez-vous donc, c’était un sort pénible90 So the very presence of the particle (it is interesting to note that there are 36 entries in the Oxford Book of English Verse whose first lines begin with ‘O’) emphasises the alternative. Two examples confirm the point about the centrality of Prynne’s observations: Surprised by joy – impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport – Oh! with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find?91 Here Wordsworth is brought to horrid self-consciousness of his loss with that very meaningless empty oh: the moment of recalling his loss

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brings then a torment of guilt which the sonnet broods upon, remembering that he had forgotten his daughter’s death. The oh is precise in remarking upon the impotence of life before its final outcome: beyond vicissitude, that is, change. Hence there is a redundant adjective ‘silent’ which reinforces the poem’s absorption within its own contradiction. She who would be apostrophised cannot of course be reached but then that is a crucial aspect of apostrophe in the first instance. Hopkins serves a second example where the apostrophe is to a present subject on the point of becoming absent. This is a crucial moment because the poem is gearing itself up to reveal its true story, namely the meaning of the crucifixion: that meaning is anticipated precisely by the lines. Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then . . . 92 The poem has set off at breakneck speed (‘I caught this morning morning’s minion . . . ’) and the fact that the particle occurs at the very centre of the line turning the sonnet from the octave to the sestet makes it on one level the key word in the poem – until ‘AND’ that is. The point then is that the two words are in union moving towards the paradoxical conjunction that Christ’s life’s fullest attainment was at the precise moment of its earthly extinction, the triumphant culmination of profound spiritual and physical suffering: ‘oh’ is thus an expression of a multiplicity of emotions which are confronting all the joinedness of ‘Buckle!’ Everything is linked and is conjoined – ‘AND’. But it is conjoined in a physical and spiritual union which is equally beyond our comprehension; in other words, ‘oh’ signals the loss of articulation that is commensurate with religious worship. Thus the particle is repeated but transformed, becoming if anything adjectival in the expression at the end of this tercet: ‘O my chevalier’. The particle’s struggle with the absence of plenitude is then a confirmation of the ordered discourse of the real. The elimination of the living reminds us of that fragility to existence which Larkin notes in ‘The Building’: real life is here, at the end, in hospital where ‘unreal Life’ passes uncomprehendingly by: –O World Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch Of any hand from here! And so, unreal, A touching dream to which we all are lulled But wake from separately.93

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The particle here is opposite to the inversion of presence/absence; the tone is perhaps of resignation but also of unheeded observation and prophecy: well, we too shall find out. This serious play with the edge of plenitude and complete absence, between telling and being unable to tell since there’s nothing more to tell, is wonderfully realised by Frost: moving the minimum beyond the empty particle, he allows a full and shocking confrontation with the seeping away of plenitude as the blood flows from the severed arm and hand of the young saw-mill operator in ‘Out, Out’. He saw all spoiled ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off – The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him sister!’ So. But the hand was gone already. . . . They listened at his heart. Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it. ‘So’: and what does that mean? Thus? And now? Surprise? Resignation? The conjunction in the narrative? or exactly the opposite: a meaningless particle beginning a new thought? For the poem walks us to the edge and then leaves us there, just as the living leave the dead: No more to build on there. And they, since they, Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.94 So what? That is both a narrative and an observation about narrative and its essentiality to life; nothing more to build on there; nothing more to tell. The absence of any expression of grief is, of course, the point that Frost leaves before us: grief is useless. The silence is thus the space here where the reader must do the talking; yes grief is useless, not necessary, but then so are many things. Including, according to Wilde, all art. Can we live as we wish to understand ourselves without it? If the answer to that is no, doesn’t it then present us with an affirmative to the obvious words we can use to express it? Even if we can express guilt; remorse; loss – as Wordsworth realised – in the end there is nothing more to say but to say it. Language is the expression of the finite. Nothing more to say. Little Caesar on the lam falls on hard times. Finally cornered, he tries to fight his way out of a date with the noose: ‘Police car out in front, boss.’ Rico made a dive for the door, but Chiggi grabbed him by the arm.

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‘Out the back, Louis.’ Chiggi leapt across the room and pulled a switch and all the lights in the place went out. Then he took Rico by the arm and led him through the hall and out into a little court at the rear. ‘So long, Louis,’ he said. Chiggi slammed the door. Rico was in utter darkness. ‘A hell of a chance I got,’ he said. He stepped cautiously out into the alley back of the court and took a look around. The alley was blind to his right; to his left it came out on to a main thoroughfare and there was a bright arc at that end. Rico took out his gun and moved slowly toward the arc light. ‘You can’t never tell,’ he said; then, in an excess of rage: ‘They’ll never put no cuffs on this baby.’ When he was within fifty feet of the main thoroughfare a man appeared at the end of the alley-way, a big man in a derby hat. He saw Rico and immediately blew a blast on his whistle. Rico raised his gun and pulled the trigger; it missed fire. Rico was frantic. He wanted to live. For the first time in his life he addressed a vague power which he felt to be stronger than himself. ‘Give me a break! Give me a break!’ he implored. The man in the derby hat raised his arm and Rico rushed him, pumping lead. Rico saw a long spurt of flame and then something hit him a sledge hammer blow in the chest. He took two steps, dropped his gun, and fell flat on his face. He heard a rush of feet up the alley. ‘Mother of God,’ he said, ‘is this the end of Rico?’95 Was this the end of Rico; snivelling even as his gun blazed at the strangely abstracted terminator at the end of the alley? Yes. Thus, Rico’s pathetic last words – his helpless rhetorical question – finished the narrative. End of Rico; end of story; end of book. The rest is silence.

Notes 1. T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London, 1963), p. 194. 2. J. Keats, The Letters of John Keats, ed. R. Gittings (Oxford, 1982), p. 221. 3. W. R. Burnett, Little Caesar (London, 1929), p. 30. 4. Ibid., p. 235. 5. Ibid., p. 227. 6. Dante Alighieri, Inferno (London, 1932), XXVII, ll. 61–6. 7. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Collected Poems 1909–1962, p. 16.

On Linearity 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 15. Alighieri, Inferno, XXVII, ll. 73–5. Ibid., ll. 97–105. Ibid., ll. 113–20. Ibid., ll. 121–3. Ibid., l. 119. The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, The Florentines, Cantica I Hell (L’Inferno), trans. D. L. Sayers (Harmondsworth, 1949), note to ll. 118–20, p. 245. R. Kirkpatrick, Dante’s Inferno Difficulty and Dead Poetry (Cambridge, 1987), p. 360. Ibid., p. 349. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, p. 15. P. Larkin, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, The Whitsun Weddings (London, 1964), pp. 21–3. S. Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, Johnson as Critic, ed. J. Wain (London, 1973), p. 153. J. Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Poetical Works of John Keats, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford, 1956), p. 207. W. Stevens, ‘Of Mere Being’, Opus Posthumous (London, 1957), pp. 117–18. J. Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 220. Keats, The Letters of John Keats, p. 92. J. Keats, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 350. Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’, Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 220. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry’, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. F. Kermode, p. 111. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, The Waste Land, Collected Poems 1909–1962, p. 65, ll. 69–73. T. S. Eliot, ‘Death by Water’, The Waste Land, Collected Poems 1909–1962, p. 75, ll. 319–21. S. T. Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1969), p. 242, ll. 54–62. T. S. Eliot, ‘Notes on the Waste Land’, Collected Poems 1909–1962, p. 86. W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford, 1907), I.v.32–4. Note the justification for reading ‘roots’, in this passage, given by the Editor: ‘(1.33. roots. This Q2 reading is preferred to F’s rots because it offers a strong resistance to stir (1.34), and it fits in perfectly with the other instances of “things rank and gross in nature” which are too frequent in the play’. J. Milton, ‘On His Blindness’, The Poems of John Milton, ed. J. Carey and A. Fowler (London, 1968), p. 330, l. 2. Keats, letter to Georgiana Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 13 January 1820, p. 349. F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. and annotated by R. Harris (London, 1983), p. 121. Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, Johnson as Critic, p. 159. S. Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755.

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40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. A. Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. J. Butt (London, 1968), p. 153, ll. 297–300. 43. S. Johnson, ‘Cowley’, Lives of the Poets, vol. 1, introduction A. Waugh (London, 1955), p. 13. 44. J. Dryden, ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’, English Critical Texts, ed. D. J. Enright and Ernst de Chickera (London, 1962), p. 52, l. 87. 45. Ibid., p. 353, l. 652. 46. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, p. 61. 47. W. Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, III.i.98. 48. W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 81, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. S. Booth (New Haven, 1978), p. 71. 49. Ibid., p. 278. 50. Ibid. 51. J. Dryden, ‘The Tenth Satyr of Juvenal’, The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 2, ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1958), p. 728, ll. 318–21. 52. S. Johnson, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. D. N. Smith and E. L. McAdam (Oxford, 1975), p. 128, ll. 263–6. 53. Dryden, ‘The Tenth Satyr of Juvenal’, The Poems of John Dryden, vol. 2, p. 729, ll. 238–9. 54. S. Johnson, ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, The Poems of Samuel Johnson, p. 129, l. 308. 55. W. Whitman, ‘Preface to Leaves of Grass’ (1855), ed. J. Kaplan, The Library of America (New York, 1982), p. 25. 56. W. Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891–1892), The Library of America, p. 165. 57. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Walt Whitman’, Studies in Classic American Literature, Selected Literary Criticism, ed. A. Beal (London, 1967), p. 402. 58. Whitman, ‘Preface to Leaves of Grass’, p. 13. 59. W. Whitman, ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’, Leaves of Grass, p. 393, ll. 160–73. 60. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, pp. 69–70. 61. G. M. Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie (Oxford, 1970), p. 69. 62. Ibid., note to p. 268, ll. 13–14. 63. Keats, Letters of John Keats, p. 40. 64. C. Spurgeon, Keats’s Shakespeare: A Descriptive Study (Oxford, 1928), pp. 24–30. 65. Shakespeare, Sonnet 23, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 23. 66. J. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, The Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 210. 67. W. Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1964), p. 371. 68. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, The Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 210. 69. W. Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, Selected Poems (London, 1965), p. 36. 70. J. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, The Poetical Works of John Keats, p. 210. 71. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets, Collected Poems 1909–1962, p. 189. 72. Keats, Letters of John Keats, p. 398. 73. R. Jakobson, ‘Dialogue on Time in Language and Literature’, Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, ed. K. Pomeroska and S. Rudy (Oxford, 1985), p. 13. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., Krystyna Pomeroska, p. 14.

On Linearity 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.

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Ibid., Jakobson, p. 20. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., Krystyna Pomeroska, p. 23. Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Oxford Shakespeare, III.ii.108. Ibid., V.ii. Ibid., V.ii.4–11. Ibid., V.ii.166–70. T. S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet’, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, p. 47. Ibid., p. 48. Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Oxford Shakespeare, III.ii.81–4. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Arden Edition, note 92, p. 324. W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Oxford Shakespeare, I.v.55–7. J. Prynne, ‘English Poetry and Emphatical Language’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXIV (1988), pp. 140ff. Eliot, ‘Death by Water’, ll. 319–21. T. S. Eliot, ‘Dans le Restaurant’, Collected Poems 1909–1962, p. 54. W. Wordsworth, ‘Surprised by Joy’, Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, revised E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1969), p. 204, ll. 1–4. Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 69. P. Larkin, ‘The Building’, High Windows (London, 1974), pp. 24–7. R. Frost, ‘Out, Out’, Selected Poems of Robert Frost, introduction R. Graves (New York, 1963), p. 90. Burnett, Little Caesar, pp. 251–2.

Part Three Memoirs

9 Piers in Hong Kong Denis MacShane

First the arrival. He was always there. Standing sometimes or in one of the bars and cafés of Kai Tak. The ceremony was beautifully constructed. An elegant seizing of one of the bags or cases. A swift hop upstairs to the departure level to grab a taxi off-loading passengers without waiting in queue. ‘Star Ferry, Kowloon side!’ was barked out. No time-wasting inanities about the journey, health or well-being but straight into the most recent lies of the government. Any government. That of Hong Kong, that of Beijing, principally the enormous lies of the two administrators that held sway over the central years of his life: Thatcher in London and Reagan in Washington. The talk meant the arrival was different. Normally after the numbing misery of air travel, the slump into a car or transfer bus adds exponentially to the tiredness. Drive in from JFK or Narita and exhaustion takes hold. Not the Gray meeting in Hong Kong. High-octane conversation took off at once. Gossip to be sure. All politics is personal and Piers offered the most brilliant running commentary on holders of authority in every sphere. The spirit was lifted in the back of the red Toyota as it worked its way through Kowloon to the ferry terminal. The need to take the ferry was his fear of tunnels, of lifts, in short of being trapped in any way. Piers was rootless, or rather his only roots lay in his cosmopolitanism. He knew everything but lived nowhere. Canada; Cambridge; the Pokfulam and Portobello Roads – where did he belong? For some, transit lounges are better than arrival halls. In a sense, Piers never arrived. But he made sure any friend coming to Hong Kong arrived in style. If the conversation lit up the first taxi ride the gentle swaying of the boat across the harbour was the perfect way to begin again absorbing the splendour of Hong Kong. The hard bench seats with their backs on hinges was a reminder of the infrastructure of an 253

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Appendix: Memoirs of Piers Gray

earlier age. Piers in Hong Kong liked things hard. His politics, his sport, his drinks and his contempts had no softness at all. Then another taxi to his flat and the day began. Piers kept curious hours which became ever more curious over the years as his handsome and muscular body grappled with drink. (‘It’s Sunday and shitty and I shall start getting drunk soon,’ he wrote to me sometime in the 1980s. Piers rarely dated his letters.) But in the first years in Hong Kong – up to about the mid-1980s – there was restless energy as the process of making sense of the sensations on offer in the colony was carried on. Was he a better talker or writer? I have letters which still delight. The apogee of Stalinist advice to the Chinese was after the War when Mao was told by the heroic great uncle to repopulate China. Get it up! The Great Fuck Backwards! We had some Glyndebourne here which did a sombre and unpleasant Don Giovanni. Sir P. Hall, I regret, made the play a ghastly spectacle about total misery i.e. the poor old Don’s pecker frenzy made his life on earth hell anyway and an absolutely dreary/campy (This would seem a paradox I agree) performance of Britten Midsummer N’s Dream: absolutely dreadful fuck up of S’peare, the opera itself and queer – I mean queer. His play The Twelfth Man I consider to be a far finer exposition of the phenomenon of Anthony Blunt or Kim Philby and the moral rottenness of the 1930s/1980s than any novel or narrative, equivalent in its explanatory powers to Auden. His essays, notably those on Stalin’s linguistics and GBS in Hong Kong, remain masterpieces of readability. The sheer tedium of most academic work was a stranger to Piers. Once in 1989 he shoved a clipping from the International Herald Tribune into my hand. A Pennsylvania professor had analysed academic writing and decided that professors who wish to be published in the academic profession must: 1 2 3 4 5

Not pick an important subject; not challenge existing beliefs; not obtain surprising results; not use simple methods; not write clearly.

Piers of course was incapable of obeying any of those rules. The unqualified mediocrity of Hong Kong University, which made the average


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Anatolian college of further education appear an All Souls by comparison, gave him no mercy when it came to promotion. The greasy pole of career is a difficult business for intellectuals to handle. All humans need recognition and status. The affection and admiration, not to say awe, that many of the finest minds in Britain had for Piers Gray was not shared by his fellow exiled colleagues, or at least those who decided matters of promotion. Friends he had in plenty from the university, but understanding? The strait-jacket of exile added to a sense of isolation. Private Eye and the London Review of Books, the Spectator and the NYRB would come in through the door like month-old copies of The Times and Country Life arriving up-station in the British Asia of old. Other friends went home after making their first mini-fortunes in banking or in the churn-around of university jobs but Piers stayed. Did he become, albeit vicariously, a China hand? He never learnt Cantonese but then even Hong Kong’s most illustrious Brit, the last Governor, Chris Patten, has confessed that the foreign language lessons he took in his five-year term as head of the colony were French not Chinese. What he could not do well, Piers did not want to do at all. Cricket, tennis, opera, conversation, writing, charm, wit – of course, they all came effortlessly but embarking on Cantonese or Mandarin offered no guarantees of mastery. Even the China hands end up with egg on their faces. The accounts now emerging of the negotiations with Deng Xiaoping over the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese show that elementary mistakes in interpretation and understanding by officials can lead to substantial mistakes in policy decision by government representatives. The centrality of Hong Kong’s future became the dominant political obsession of the last years of Piers Gray’s life. Each visit in the years between Margaret Thatcher’s infamous deal with Deng and the final approach of incorporation back under communist Beijing’s control was marked by more murky stories of corruption, complacency and croneyism on the part of the Hong Kong ruling, business and judicial elite. Piers was genuinely angry at the unqualified lack of imagination of the British betrayers of Hong Kong’s integrity. Of the Chinese cynicism, he had little to say except a great snorting laugh at the end of yet another story about how they had outwitted or shown up the gwailos and made them lose yet more face. Like Claud Cockburn who, in the 1930s, was able to construct huge scenarios of European crisis or war on the basis of a scrap of newspaper showing shares soaring in Italian construction companies (i.e. they

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must be on the way to invade Abyssiania) Piers would find the key story in the South China Morning Post to build a narrative edifice of corruption and betrayal by the rulers of Hong Kong and those hurrying its people into the hands of Chinese rule. He was in the perfect position to write one of the great chronicles of late twentieth-century history. How I begged him to become the Lytton Strachey of the end of empire. But the play was the thing, the need to make drama out of his genius for writing instead of using his genius to write about the drama he was living through. Take Up the White Man’s burden No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper, The tale of common things. (Kipling) The serfs and sweepers of Hong Kong are the great untold story of the statelet’s rise to wealth. Piers had the complete toolbox to become the Kipling recording the end of Britain in Asia but Hong Kong will pass into the oblivion of history without its last years of plumage and double-faced treachery ever written down with the style required. Now and then I would arrange for him to be published in the New Statesman. His sentences were perfect jewels in the midst of the clod-hopping paragraphs of most of its contributors in that dark period of left journalism in the 1980s. He was of the left, I think, but utterly indifferent to the vapouring uselessness of the Anglo-Saxon left in their recent uninspiring years. The failure to engage with the question of China left him restless and unsatisfied. Other than some tawdry articles in the New Left Review, hoping against hope and experience that some elements of socialism were to be found in the Middle Kingdom simply because Deng and his gang called themselves communist, the engagement of the English intelligentsia with China has been dull and indifferent. The squalor of university teachers from England (he was angry about one egregious case from York University) apologising for Tiananmen Square in exchange for a few study trips and access to China drove him beyond despair. In his play, The Twelfth Man, Piers has one of his characters say that it can never be the same again, but it won’t become different. He missed out on the handover of Hong Kong, that bizarre ceremony marking another stage on this nightmarish business of making sense of Britain coming to terms with itself. It is becoming different and Piers had the


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power of narrative to write a great story about what was happening to his country. But I can hear a great cynical snort and the high bark of laughter at such Cleopatra’s nose history. He will be forever part of the history of Hong Kong in its last years of colonial rule – a small part but like a miniature of hand-carved ivory there is more wealth of detail in memories which the many friends who stayed with him over nearly two decades will always be enriched by. Up and down the Pokfulam Road, his spirit will linger, present, sharp, unforgettable. 1997

10 Language: Black, White and Shades of Gray Roy Harris

I I first encountered Piers Gray when he fired a witty but wicked question at me after a seminar paper I had just given. He sat quietly by the door – as usual, I was to discover, for he suffered from claustrophobia – and had looked harmless enough before unleashing this potentially lethal missile. I decided that the man must be a cricketer and was operating on the principle that a quick bouncer at a new batsman was the right way to test him out. So I duly ducked and allowed his question to whizz over my head and thud into the blackboard that served as sight screen behind me. But a few minutes later I made a point of returning obliquely to the matter his question had raised, and thus established that if he knew how to bowl, then I knew how to bat, and could even score the odd single. Our relationship prospered from that point on. I cannot claim to have known Piers well enough to understand why. But it seemed to me that it was a novel experience for him to meet a linguist he could talk to about language: in other words, a linguist who was not peddling the usual phoneme – morpheme patter. He liked a review I had once written on the subject of ‘black-and-white’ lexicography. For my part, I was relieved to encounter an astute analyst of literary language who, in spite of coming from Cambridge, had no time for the notion that the true appreciation of literature was a calling for a chosen few. The first time I heard him lecture was at a routine nine o’clock class for undergraduates. I realised there and then that I was listening to something rare. He talked to an audience of Chinese first-year students about a poem by Frost; and what he said not only engaged their interest utterly, but could have been published verbatim in any academic 258


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journal of the first rank. I do not think I have heard a better lecture in any university before or since.

II In retrospect I am surprised to recollect that when we talked together at any length it was rarely about language. At least, not overtly. But that was perhaps because we both took it for granted that many topics have a linguistic dimension that is best explored by ignoring it. I cannot, for example, remember ever arguing with Piers about the definition of a word or the meaning of a passage. But I recall pursuing in some detail the rationale of our understanding of the American constitution and the l.b.w. law. It now seems to me significant that these are topics in which careful consideration of what a text says is important, but only in the context of some further purpose which is more important still. I think we both felt that one of the worst delusions fostered by the academic study of words and texts is the belief that these abstractions have an independent existence, a life of their own, which is somehow detached from the contexts that gave birth to them and those that perpetuate them. When lecturing, he had a characteristic way of rattling off quotations from the work under analysis at breakneck speed, as if to distance himself from them, or at least make it clear to his audience that he was discussing them, not performing them in the rostrum manner affected by some academics when engaging with literary texts. Although he always had scrupulous respect for what appeared in black and white on the printed page, and for the apparatus of établissement du texte, one was left with the impression that the black-and-white forms were never for him more than provisional clues to action or interpretation. It came as no surprise to find that, of all the various forms of literature, for Piers drama was paramount. And this was why he refused to dramatise the texts on which he lectured.

III The University of Hong Kong never acknowledged his academic talents as it should have done. While dishing out promotions and personal chairs like bowls of soup at a Salvation Army centre, it solemnly rejected his candidature for the vacant Chair of English Literature. Ironically, another internal candidate was preferred, whose appointment Senate then refused to confirm. As a result of this ludicrous stalemate,

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there is now no Professor of English Literature in a department which was once headed by Edmund Blunden. I still have the letter Piers wrote to me, after my own departure from Hong Kong, describing this grotesque comedy of errors, along with a no less graphic account of how local termites had recently destroyed a whole bookcase of volumes and papers in his office. Perhaps there was some analogy I was expected to grasp.

IV Two articles that Piers wrote, one on Stalin’s linguistics and the other on ‘indecent speech’, seem to me to contain some of the most intelligent comments I have encountered on either subject. The two subjects are, I think, intimately connected, although the connections may not be immediately apparent. As far as Piers was concerned, Stalin’s pronouncements on language were profoundly – almost unspeakably – indecent, whereas the ‘saying fucking’ that Edward Thomas reports of soldiers on their way to the trenches was nothing if not decent. That contrast might perhaps have occurred to a number of observers. But I doubt whether any but Piers would have linked this in turn to Wordsworth’s remarks on ‘the real language of men’. Or seen the irony in the fact that Stalin’s linguistics came from the mouth of a self-proclaimed ‘man of steel’. Or chuckled at the ‘Romantic association of bad language with the destruction of innocence’, while pointing out the duplicity of the Chinese authorities in republishing Stalin’s obscenities for their own political purposes. A critic who could see all these things and grasp the relations between them was no dupe of what passes professionally either for the study of linguistics or for the study of literature in the majority of universities today. 1997

Index

blank verse in Romeo and Juliet, 57–65 Bloomfield, 183 Blunden, Edmund, 112 Booth, Stephen, 229 Bradley, F. H. ‘The Presuppositions of Critical History’, 105, 128 Brockmeyer, Henry C., 83 Brooke, Arthur The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, 76–7 Buoyant Billions (Shaw), 113 ‘Burial of the Dead, The’ (Eliot), 223 Burnett, W. R. Little Caesar, 212–13, 245–6 ‘Burnt Norton’ (Eliot), 238

A Rebours (Huysmans), 146, 147, 148 abstraction, 25, 32 Adagia (Stevens), 4 analogy Stevens on, 13 ‘Anecdote of the Jar’ (Stevens), 36, 237 Arlington, A. C., 138 art as expression of desire for beauty, 9 Ash Wednesday (Eliot), 223 Astrophel and Stella (Sidney), 55 bad language see swearing Baldwin, T. W. Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 66 ‘Bantams in Pine-Woods’ (Stevens), 36–7, 41 Baudelaire, Charles, ‘On the Essence of Laughter’, 153, 154 Baur, F. C. Epochs of Church History, 104 beauty art as expression of, 9 Bedford, Ian ‘Stalin on Linguistics’, 183–4 Benamou, Michel, 14 Bergson, Henri, 87, 88–9, 90, 92–3 Bernard Shaw in Shanghai (ed. Lu Xun and Qu Qiubai), 133, 137 Bernhardt, Sarah, 146, 149 Bewley, Marius, 36 ‘Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws, The’ (Stevens), 35–6 ‘Birthday of the Infanta, The’ (Wilde), 153–4 Blackmur, R. P., 22

Cai Yuanpei, 127, 128, 132 Cassidy, P. S., 110 Cézanne, Paul, 15 Cheng, Irene, 113 Chiang Kaishek, 114, 131–2, 134 China and language, 182–3 publishing of Stalin’s linguistic theories, 182, 183 see also Hong Kong; Shanghai China Weekly Review, 127 Christianity, 101–2 Coleridge, S. T., 204 Biographia Literaria, 201 ‘Frost at Midnight’, 224 ‘Comedian as the Letter C, The’ (Stevens), 9, 38–45, 46, 47 comedy, 38–9 261

262

Index

community Royce on, 87–90 community of interpretation and past religion, 100–4 and Royce, 95, 98–100 and science, 97–8 Copleston, Frederick History of Philosophy, 83–4 Costello, Harry T., 81 couplet, 235 Cubism, 15–16, 19 Dante Alighieri Inferno, 214–15, 216–18 Davis, H., 193 ‘Death by Water’ (Eliot), 223–4 Desmoiselles d’Avignon, Les (Picasso), 15 Deutscher, Isaac, 165, 168 didacticism, 25, 26, 36 ‘Domination of Black’ (Stevens), 22–4 ‘Dominion of the Blood’ (Stevens), 10–11 Dorian Gray see Picture of Dorian Gray, The Douglas, Lord Alfred, 149–50, 159 ‘Dry Salvages, The’ (Eliot), 83 Dryden, John, 228 ‘The Tenth Satyr of Juvenal’, 230–1 Duthie, G. I., 53 Edward and Susan, or The Beauty of Buttermere, 203–4 ‘Effects of Analogy’ (Stevens), 13 Eliot, T. S., 81–4, 88, 105, 223–4, 243 and ambiguities of syntax, 239 attention paid to questions raised by scientific method, 96–7 ‘The Burial of the Dead’, 223 ‘Burnt Norton’, 238 ‘Death by Water’, 223–4 ‘The Dry Salvages’, 83 ‘The Function of Criticism’, 92 ‘Gerontion’, 92, 93 The Idea of Christian Society, 96 interest in philosophy, 84 and interpretation, 82 ‘The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual’, 92

Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, 81 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, 213–14, 218 ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, 228 The Waste Land, 92, 93, 223–4, 243 on verse, 78 Ellmann, Richard, 155 ‘Emperor of Ice Cream, The’ (Stevens), 37–8, 41 Empson, William, 237 Engels, Friedrich, 178, 180 First Circle, The (Solzhenitsyn), 166, 170, 171–2, 173–4, 177, 184, 185 Flaubert, Gustave, 145–6 ‘Floral Decorations for Bananas’ (Stevens), 16 ‘Frost at Midnight’ (Coleridge), 224 Frost, Robert ‘Out, Out’, 245 fuck/fucking, use of, 189–94, 195, 198–9 Gatting, Mike, 193, 199 ‘Gerontion’ (Eliot), 92, 93 Goldman, William Adventures in the Screen Trade, 190 Great Wall (China), 138 Guóyu, 182 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 225, 240–2 Harmonium (Stevens), 3–47 Harris, R., 193 Harris, W. T., 83, 84 Hart-Davis, Rupert, 146 Heine, Heinrich, 145 ‘High-Toned Old Christian Woman, A’ (Stevens), 5 Himmer, Robert, 169–70 Hitler, Adolf, 152, 164–5 Ho Tung, Sir Robert, 112–15 Hoggart, Richard, 198 Hollis, Roger, 130 Hong Kong, 110–25 advising of students to become Communists by Shaw, 114–18, 130, 137 General Strike in Canton (1925), 122

Index Lu Xun’s press article on visit of Shaw to, 123–5 Piers Gray in, 253–7 reaction to Shaw’s visit, 119–21 response and reaction to Shaw’s speech to students, 118–19, 121–3 Shaw’s visit to Ho Tung, 112–15 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, ‘The Windhover’, 235–6, 244 Hornell, Sir William, 115 Hulme, T. E., 19 Huysmans, J. K. A Rebours (Against the Grain), 146–7, 148 Imagism, 20, 25, 26, 34 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 154, 155 Impressionists, 15 ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (Pound), 25 indecent speech see swearing Inferno (Dante), 214–15, 216–18 interpretation Royce’s theory of, 82, 90–5 ‘Irrational Element in Poetry, The’ (Stevens), 15 Isaacs, Harold, 127, 128, 136 Isherwood, Christopher, 125–6 Jakobson, R. ‘Dialogue on Time in Language and Literature’, 238–40 James, William, 87, 88 Japan invasion of Manchuria, 111 Jay, T., 194 John Bull’s Other Island (Shaw), 117 Johnson, Samuel, 58, 219, 225–7, 235, 239 on Cowley, 228 Dictionary of the English Language, 226–7 ‘Preface to Shakespeare’, 219, 225–6 ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’, 231–2 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The, 83–4

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Joyce, James ‘Oscar Wilde – the Poet of Salomé’, 150–1, 155, 159 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 59 Keats, John, 239 last known letter, 238 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 219–20, 236–8 ‘Ode on Melancholy’, 220–2 Kenner, Hugh, 19 Kermode, Frank The Arden Shakespeare, The Tempest (ed.), 191 The Genesis of Secrecy, 105–6 Khrushchev, N., 165 Kirkpatrick, R., 218 Kora in Hell (Williams, William Carlos), 21 Kuomintang (Nationalists), 114, 116 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 196–200 Laforgue, Jules, 145 Langer, Susanne, 38–9 Larkin, P. H., 121 Larkin, Philip, 193, 195 ‘The Building’, 244–5 Latimer, Ronald Lane, 25 laughter, 153, 154 Lawrence, D. H., 209–10 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 196–200 Studies in Classic American Literature, 233 League for Civil Rights, 127, 136 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 232–3 Lenin, V. I., 169–70 ‘Life is Motion’ (Stevens), 37 Lin Yutang, 128, 129, 130, 132, 136 linearity, 212–46 Little Caesar (Burnett), 212–13, 245–6 ‘Load of Sugar Cane, The’ (Stevens), 21–2 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’ (Eliot), 213–14, 218 loyalty Royce on, 85–7

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Index

Lu Xun, 123–5, 127, 128, 129, 134–5, 135–6 ‘Who is the Paradox?’, 132–3 Lugard, Sir Edward, 114 Lun Yu (Analects), 128 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 200–1, 202, 207–9, 232 MacKinnon, Jan and Steven Agnes Smedley: Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution (eds), 129 Mallarmé, Etienne, 145 Manchuria Japanese invasion of, 111 Mao Zedong, 134 Marr, Nikolai Yakovlevich, 165, 171–7, 178, 180, 181, 182 Marx, Karl, 178, 181 Marxism and Problems of Linguistics (Stalin), 165, 171, 177–82, 184–5 Mason, H. A. Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love, 52–5 May 4th Movement, 114 Mei Lanfang, 136–7 metaphors, 32 ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico’ (Stevens), 16–17 Milton, John, 225 ‘Monocle de Mon Oncle, Le’ (Stevens), 9, 27, 29–32, 33, 34, 37, 45 Moreau, Gustave, 152 Salomé Dancing Before Herod, 148–9 ‘Mrs Alfred Uruguay’ (Stevens), 45–6 narrative, 219, 220, 240, 245 New York Amoury Show (1913), 15 ‘Nomad Exquisite’ (Stevens), 24–5, 26 North China Herald, The, 122, 130, 136 Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (Stevens), 5 ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (Keats), 219–20, 236–8 ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (Keats), 220–2 ‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (Baudelaire), 153, 154 ‘On Poetic Truth’ (Stevens), 4 On the Rocks (Shaw), Preface to, 117, 118, 122

Orwell, George, 186 ‘Out, Out’ (Frost), 245 painting relations to poetry, 14–19, 20 pan-Turkic movement, 183 Pauline Churches, 86, 88, 100, 102 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 43 ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’ (Stevens), 6–9, 12, 27–8 Philosophy of Loyalty (Royce), 84–5 Picasso, Pablo Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, 15 Pictorial Biography of Lu Xun, A, 135–6 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 146–7, 148, 152, 155, 159 Pincher, Chapman Their Trade is Treachery, 129–30 pluralism and Royce, 87 Pope, Alexander An Essay on Criticism, 227–8 Pound, Ezra ‘In a Station of the Metro’, 25 Praz, Mario The Romantic Agony, 145, 146 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 202–3, 204–7 Problem of Christianity, The (Royce), 85–7, 90, 93–4, 99–100, 103–4 Prynne, J. H. ‘English Poetry and Emphatical Language’, 242–3 pun, 227, 228, 229, 232, 235, 238 Qu Qiubai, 133–4 quibble, 226–7, 228, 232, 235, 238 Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Questions (Royce), 84–5 ‘Relations between Poetry and Painting, The’ (Stevens), 14 rhyming couplets in Romeo and Juliet, 65–71 Richards, I. A. Science and Poetry, 97 Robinson, Mary, 203–6

Index Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot), 192, 193 Romanticism, 200 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 52–80 blank verse, 57–65 fate/fortune in, 53 prose, 56–7 rhyming couplets in, 65–71 use of sonnet in, 52–6, 71–80 Rotarians, 110, 115, 130 Royce, Josiah, 81, 84–90 and community, 87–90 and community of interpretation, 95, 98–100 loyalty as resolution to bringing collection of wills into concordant relations, 85–6 Philosophy of Loyalty, 84–5 and pluralism, 87 positive historical view, 92 The Problem of Christianity, 85–7, 90, 93–4, 99–100, 103–4 Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Questions, 84–5 on reality, 93 theory of interpretation, 82, 90–5 St Louis Philosophical Society, 83 Salomé Dancing Before Herod (Moreau), 148–9 Salomé (Wilde), 146, 149–50, 151, 154, 155, 156–9 ‘Satyr on Charles II, A’ (Earl of Rochester), 192 Saussure, F. de, 185, 234–5, 238–9 Sayers, Dorothy L., 218 science, and community of interpretation, 97–8 ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’ (Stevens), 14–15, 46–7 Shakespeare, William, 190–1, 194, 227, 236 Hamlet, 225, 240–2 Julius Caesar, 59 Sonnet 81, 229–30 The Tempest, 190–1, 193 see also Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare’s Tragedies of Love (Mason), 52–5

265

Shanghai, 125–38 challenging of reality by, 125–6 Shaw as guest of honour at Madame Sun’s lunch, 128–31, 132–3, 135–6 Shaw’s speech at the Pen Club meeting, 136–7 and Smedley, 128–30 violence directed against writers/intellectuals and counter-opposition, 127–8 Shanghai International Settlement, 127 Shaw, Bernard, 110–61 advising of Hong Kong students to support Communism, 114–18, 130, 137 ‘Aesthetic Science’, 113 and Capitalism, 117, 118 on Communism, 117 in Hong Kong, 110–25; see also Hong Kong Lu Xun on, 132–3 lunch with Madame Sun in Shanghai, 128–31, 132–3, 135–6 Preface to On the Rocks, 117, 118, 122 in Shanghai, 125–38 speech at Pen Club meeting (Shanghai), 136–7 on Stalin, 131 view of Soviet Union and international socialism, 137 visits Great Wall, 138 Shen Bao, 123, 137 Sidney, Sir Philip, 55 Simpson, Professor R. K., 112 Smedley, Agnes, 128–30 ‘Snow Man, The’ (Stevens), 34 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 164, 185 The First Circle, 166–7, 170, 171–2, 173–4, 177, 184, 185 sonnet use of in Romeo and Juliet, 52–6, 71–80 Soong Chingling see Sun, Madame South China Morning Post, 114, 115, 119, 122

266

Index

Soviet Union, 131 languages, 183–4 Shaw’s view of, 137 see also Stalin Spence, Jonathan The Gate of Heavenly Peace, 133–4 Spencer, T. J. B., 55, 71 Spivey, N., 199 Spurgeon, Caroline Keats’s Shakespeare, 236 Stalin, Joseph, 164–86 interest in literature, 168–9 joins Third Group, 169 and Lenin, 169–70 manipulation of language’s immense power, 168, 170–1 Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, 165, 171, 177–82, 184–5 name, 169–70 publishing of linguistic theories in China, 182, 183 publishing of verses, 168 Shaw on, 131 Solzhenitsyn on Stalin’s involvement with linguistics, 166–7, 173–4 Stevens, Wallace, 3–47, 219–20, 237 and abstractions, 32 ‘Anecdote of the Jar’, 36, 237 ‘The Comedian of the Letter C’, 9, 38–45, 46, 47 on difficulty of maintaining poetic balance, 25 ‘Effects of Analogy’, 13 and Imagism, 20–1, 26 influence of Cubist thought on work, 15 ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’, 15 ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle’, 9, 27, 29–32, 33, 34, 37, 45 ‘On Poetic Truth’, 4 and painting, 14 ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’, 6–9, 12, 27–8 and reality, 4–5, 36 and relation between mind and world, 34 ‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’, 14–15, 46–7

‘Sunday Morning’, 10, 19, 29, 31, 38 theme of ironic realism in work, 30–1 ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, 17–19, 35 see also individual poems Strauss, D. F. Life of Christ, 104 Straw Sandals: Chinese Short Stories, 127 ‘Study of Two Pears’ (Stevens), 16 Sun, Madame (Soong Chingling), 127–8, 130, 132 Sun Yatsen, Dr, 114, 127 ‘Sunday Morning’ (Stevens), 10, 19, 29, 31, 38 ‘Surprised by Joy’ (Wordsworth), 243–4 swearing, 189–95 and the child, 195–6, 199 cultural shift against, 200 and Lawrence, 196–200, 209–10 learning of, 194–5 and Wordsworth, 207–9, 210 ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ (Stevens), 34 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 190–1, 193 ‘Tenth Satyr of Juvenal, The’ (Dryden), 230–1 Third Group, 169 ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (Stevens), 17–19, 35 Thomas, Edward, 189–90 ‘To the Roaring Wind’ (Stevens), 47 Trotsky, Leo, 123 ‘Vanity of Human Wishes, The’ (Johnson), 231–2 Wang Li, 183 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 92, 93, 223–4, 243 Whitman, Walt, 232–5 Wilde, Oscar, 145 and A Rebours, 146–7, 148 ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’, 153–4 and comedy, 155 comic and the cruel, 154 effect of Moreau’s Salomé Dancing Before Herod on, 148–9

Index The Importance of Being Earnest, 154, 155 Joyce’s essay on, 150–1 and Lord Alfred Douglas, 149–50 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 146–7, 148, 152, 155, 159 Salomé, 146, 149–50, 151, 154, 155, 156–9 ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, 155 trial, 159–61 Willey, Basil, 104 Williams, William Carlos, 23 ‘Windhover, The’ (Hopkins), 235–6, 244 wit, 227–8, 230, 231, 232, 236 Wollheim, Richard, 81

267

Woo Sing Lim The Prominent Chinese in Hong Kong, 112 Wordsworth, William, 190, 200–10, 243–4 ‘Advertisement’ for Lyrical Ballads, 200–2 language of, 200–2 and Mary Robinson, 204 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 207–9, 232 The Prelude, 202–3, 204–7 ‘Surprised by Joy’, 243–4 Yaguello, Marina Lunatic Lovers of Language, 175 Yang Xingfo, 128, 136 Yeats, W. B., 149

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